How I wrote ‘Here It Goes Again’ by OK Go’s Damian Kulash

OK Go’s Damian Kulash: “This song only became a single because we made the treadmill video for it without telling our label.” Photo: Piper Ferguson

From raw demo to viral video, this track’s journey is a testament to creative spontaneity, visual flair, and punk spirit

Few bands have managed to fuse music and visual art as seamlessly as OK Go. Formed in Chicago in 1998 and later relocating to Los Angeles, the quartet – comprised of Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka, and Andy Ross – first grabbed mainstream attention with their eponymous debut album in 2002. But it was their sophomore release, Oh No (2005), that launched them into viral superstardom. Among its standout tracks was Here It Goes Again, a song that would not only become a signature hit but would redefine the possibilities of music videos in the YouTube era.

Released as the fifth single from Oh No in 2006, Here It Goes Again climbed the charts, peaking at No 36 in the UK and breaking into the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. But it was the ingenious music video – featuring the band executing an elaborate dance routine on treadmills – that cemented its place in pop culture history, earning them a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video.

Here, frontman Damian shares the story behind the song that took OK Go from indie hopefuls to viral sensations…

Read OK Go’s Song Deconstructed in our Spring 2025 issue

Released: 4 September 2006
Artist: OK Go
Label:Capitol/EMI
Songwriter: Damian Kulash
Producer: Tore Johansson
UK Chart Position: 36
US Chart Position: 38

“I was in a little apartment above my garage in Los Angeles, waiting for the garage construction below me to turn into a little studio in which we’d record a lot of the next record. And I was depressed and frustrated and isolated, as people often are when writing their second album. Whoever came up with the line: ‘You have twenty years to write your first record and six months to write the next…’ I’ve heard it attributed to several different people, I’ve heard it given to Elvis Costello the most and I don’t know if that’s true or not, but he deserves it. He deserves more than a little credit for this song, too.

“I was in a phase that I go through, periodically, where there’s a lot of Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello in my life, and I’m trying to figure out why simple and direct sometimes seems so searing and perfect, and other times seems so banal and formulaic. All the best songs are love songs, and so are all the worst! So I remember feeling that you’re just chasing the dragon for your first record…

“Actually, for my entire life I had been doing painting and drawing, and punk rock had sort of come in. In high school, I had been a huge music listener, but I wasn’t much of a player. Then punk rock came along and I was like, ‘Oh, wait, it’s more about feeling and community than it is about shredding and instrumental skill.’ I went to college and I’d been so focused on visual arts that I felt, ‘What is this? This is so baby-ish.’ Whereas recording music was so new to me that I was like, ‘What is this!?’ So, over the course of my college career, I went from being visual-focused to more song-focused, and came out the other side with a sort of inverted sense of who I was.

“All of this to say that, a few years later, by the time we had our first album together, it was a collection of that whole long thing where you’re chasing whatever the feeling was. And I remember, even when the first time we ever had labels say ‘keep writing’, that just felt like another opportunity to keep on chasing the thing you’re chasing. Once you’ve lived through the cycle of major label promotion and radio stuff and touring all over the country, you then have a sense of how the sausage is made – you know what they’re going to do to what you’ve made.

“And I don’t think that’s a terrible thing, I’m not like, ‘What are all these horrible bean counters doing to my art!?’ But, it makes it very hard to go back to sitting and making your art with the big, dreamy idea of ‘if you love it, they’ll love it.’ You know, what have now become Rick Rubin truisms, were truisms back then too – they just weren’t so well said and all by one person! But I wasn’t dumb enough to think that I should actually worry about what the label wanted, or what radio wants, or what even an audience of any kind wants. You just go, ‘I know it’s not going to feel real, unless it feels real to me.’

“I remember, at that moment, I was obsessed with Is She Really Going Out With Him by Joe Jackson, which you’ll notice is the exact same chords – it’s I V VII IV… actually ours is in C… so it’s C, G, B-flat, F – and I was just going, ‘So, why does it work? Why are these four chords over and over and over again enough for a song?’ This is in a moment when a lot is pulling towards garage, the whole world was Jet and The Strokes. Literally, our label, even before our first record said, ‘Why don’t you look more like The Strokes?’

“That’s all I remember about the genesis, but when we recorded the first version of the song (I think the deluxe version of the record has the demo of it on it) the words were, ‘I think this thing has started,’ and [I thought that was] just too glib, and I could feel that I didn’t mean it. So we wind up with, ‘Here it goes again.’ I mean, I didn’t realise what I was doing at the time! It was the difference between my child-like exuberance about the world, of ‘This has started!’ to ‘Oh God, here it goes again…’

“I mean, I couldn’t stick with the simplicity and straight-forwardness of just four chords over and over again. The other half of me grew up on Shudder To Think and weird, math rock. So if you can get past the discomfort, those things start to become so unique and beautiful – there’s a way to throw in something unusual or difficult, that people will just sort of let slide past them. For our song, it’s a an uneven number [of chords]…it’s sort of a six-chord loop instead of a four-chord.

“It definitely didn’t stand out immediately. It was just another album track. Interestingly, our label at that time started dabbling with some kind of algorithmic listening machine with the ability to find hit clusters. They talked about how they would map our record… And it said [Here It Goes Again] was in the middle of the hit cluster. But the label ignored that and put out a different first single, which was Do What You Want because it was more folksy, it sounded like Jet. [Here It Goes Again] only became a single because we made the treadmill video for it, without telling them! And it came out 53 weeks after the album was released!

“So we toured for eighteen months, six months before the record came out, to try to whip up interest. Then, just as we were winding down, we were playing a festival in Moscow, when the label – who had [by that point] seen the treadmill video – put it up on stupidvideos.com. Luckily, we got it taken down before the US woke up, and we put it on YouTube ourselves that day. Then it was massively successful and we toured for another 13 or 14 months after that – it was a whole new album cycle, because the whole thing started again!

“No one thought it was going to be a single, except that one algorithm. In fact, we didn’t even tell our manager what we were doing that video, because it seems so dumb to take 10 days off from touring to go to my sister’s house and jump around on treadmills, and see if we can make something. So we didn’t tell anyone we were doing that.

“We were actually going to do it for a different song. But when we started trying to do the treadmill moves to that one, it was the wrong tempo. In our heads, it was like a much more marchy kind of song. So we listened to the whole album while we were running on the treadmills, and this is the one that felt right.

“For us, the video is not supposed to sell the song. It’s supposed to add a dimension to it. We get to go, ‘What would make the best three-and-a-half minutes?’ It’s the rise and fall of emotion, just like the song – and it’s a visual song.

“We’re very lucky that we get to do this. The world has moved on from this model as a standard commercial way to move money through the system. If you’re going to try to make it as a musician, currently, the only thing to do is play lots and lots of shows.

“I feel so lucky that we get to keep on doing this visual stuff, especially in the world of social media where it’s become so gamified that it stops being about art and starts being about numbers and likes and shares.”

After a 10-year hiatus, OK Go returned in 2025 with their long-awaited fifth album, And The Adjacent Possible. Find out more at okgo.net

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