Interview: Toby Leaman of Dr. Dog

Dr. Dog Learns New Tricks

The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. That’s what Dr. Dog discovered while working on Shame Shame, their Anti-Records debut. The band has always had an insular approach to making music, producing albums like Fate (2009), We All Belong (2007) and Easy Beat (2005) alone in their Philadelphia home studio. And that’s always worked out for them. Their critically acclaimed albums have not only drawn praise from artists, like Jack White, Beck, Jeff Tweedy, Kanye West and Lou Reed, but by fans who help them sell out 1500 capacity venues around the world. With Shame Shame, however, Dr. Dog knew they needed to try something new.

“We’ve been doing it our own way for so long that there was really no more we could figure out on our own,” says Dr. Dog bassist/vocalist Toby Leaman. “We needed somebody outside of us that had been doing it a long time and been doing it differently and recording different bands and all that kind of stuff.”

OK Go - Damian Kulash Interview

The Sky's The Limit


Nothing online is guaranteed to go viral…unless OK Go creates it. OK Go’s songs and videos have been streamed and downloaded hundreds of millions of times, making them the most-downloaded band ever. Their 2006 video for “Here It Goes Again,” which won them a Grammy®, has been viewed 50,629,115 times on YouTube. And their video for the single “This Too Shall Pass,” from their new album, Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, saw over six million views in its first six days, becoming the #1 Top Rated (All Time) music video on YouTube and going to #1 on Viral Video charts, Reddit and Digg.

But it’s not just the band’s homemade video’s that spread across the Internet. A February 21^st New York Times Op-Ed piece written by lead singer Damian Kulash had over 500,000 hits in just two days. (Kulash was criticizing Epic Music’s move to disable embedding of the band’s videos).

So what’s the secret to the band’s viral appeal? “We make cool shit,” says Kulash. And band members Kulash (vocals, guitar), Tim Nordwind (bass), Dan Konopka (drums), and Andy Ross (guitar, keys) intend to continue sharing that cool shit with fans online. They’ve parted ways with EMI to form their own label, Paracadute. So they look forward to creative life outside corporate confines. And now that they’ve found “magic” in writing music there’s no telling what’s next.

The Aquarian Weekly talks to OK Go’s Damian Kulash.