Mustard had the pleasure of speaking with Ok Koala. Together we discussed Koala’s, crocodile tears, their album “All of it, All at Once”, and so much more!
1. Mustard is grateful to have Ok Koala join them at Music Shelf. How is everyone doing today?
Jonathan: Good.
Carter: Pretty good.
Rose: OK.
Jonathan:…Koala.
Logan: We just finished rehearsing, so I’m kinda tired.
2. Koala’s are a herbivorous marsupial native to Australia. What have they said okay too?
Rose: They didn’t say OK to anything, they are just OK.
Jonathan: It’s an alright koala.
Logan: Adequate marsupial, alright drop bear…
3. Koala’s smell like eucalyptus. Would you say your music provides the same comfort as eucalyptus?
Carter: I would say yeah.
Logan: The funny thing about eucalyptus is that it’s poisonous even to koalas. It smells good and it’s useful for a lot of things, but it is poisonous even to koalas.
Rose: So then it’s pretty on brand, right?
Logan: That’s why they sleep so much, they have to digest it, it’s like working off a night of drinking or something.
Rose: So to answer the question, yes, we do give the same sensation.
Logan: Yeah, ’cause initially it’s pleasant like the smell, but then it’s a little bit toxic in there, but then, you know, you leave it long enough, you let it digest and it provides you some sustenance.
4. Mustard is getting carried away. How did you decide on your band name? What is the significance of the Koala?
Logan: I don’t remember. I do remember that the koala part I think was kind of lingering in my mind for a long time because I was hanging out with friends one time and we were all sitting up in a tree taking pictures and someone commented they looked like band press photos and so we jokingly named that Logan and the Drop Bears…And so I feel like that might have planted the seed for the koala part, but otherwise I think I just wanted a name that was short and kind of lighthearted and was kicking around some ideas and that one stuck.
5. Humans love origin stories. What is the origin story of Ok Koala?
Logan: I started writing pop-punk-style music as a break from my usual singer-songwriter fare when I was in school, and I recorded one of the songs for a friend’s recording project and had some other people I know come and record instruments on it and one of them was like, “This is super fun, kinda like pop-punk stuff. If you ever wanna do more of this, let me know.” I hadn’t even thought that that was the style that it was, but I was like, “You know, I feel like I listen to a lot of that; I could probably do something like that.” So then I wrote the songs that ended up turning into the first EP and went from there.
6. Who (or what) influences Ok Koala?
Logan: It started off with a lot of regular old mainstream pop-punk kinda stuff – My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Green Day, Hawthorne Heights, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus…and then over the last few years, a bunch of other random stuff including bands in our local scene have influenced my writing and then the more recent shit was influenced a lot more by, like, grunge and shoegaze bands.
Rose: Pool Kids.
Jonathan: Citizen.
Carter: Prince Daddy & the Hyena.
7. What is Ok Koala’s creative process?
Logan: Cry, write, question mark, profit.
Jonathan: Shitting, pissing, throwing up…
Rose: Drinking, arguing…
Logan: Genuinely, though, my songwriting process is like: have a strong emotion about something bad that happened usually, exaggerate it in lyrics so that I can get it out of my system, and then eventually turn it into something that I don’t have to be so attached to the original problem that happened but still can write something related to it and enjoy it.
8. Ok Koala began as a solo project and evolved into a band. How and when did this happen? What inspired the decision to go from solo to band?
Logan: I only have so many arms; I can’t play all the instruments.
Jonathan: Laptops only carry so much storage.
Logan: From the beginning, I wanted this to be a full-band sound. For a long time, I didn’t know if I wanted to have a dedicated full band or just random people that I occasionally got to play with me. Logistically, it just works out better to have a dedicated group anyway, but I wanted to actually be able to make it a bit collaborative, too. I just don’t like playing shows by myself the same way; it’s more fun to feed off the energy of a group of people. I’ve done random stuff with random people for one-off gigs here and there, including right at the beginning in 2018, but for a long time I just played by myself when I moved to Nashville until less than a year ago when I started talking to the three of you individually. Rose was the first to come on board, and then we all started meeting up.
9. 2018 saw the release of your EP “Coping Mechanisms.” Could you share more about this release?
Logan: That one, like I kind of alluded to earlier, was my final recording project that I did with the songs that I had already written. I got some people I knew to just play the other instruments – I did a little bit of the guitar, but most of it was another guy, and then bass and drums from two other guys I knew from school – and then I did all the vocal stuff and mixed it…Didn’t have a lot of expectations for it, but when we were recording it, I was like, “Maybe we could play some shows with this material, that could be fun.” And then I was like, “Actually, you know, I think I could write more in this style and I like the name, so I’ll keep doing stuff until something else happens.”
10. Mustard wonders if there are birthdays this year?
Logan: That one [the song “No Birthdays This Year” being referenced] came out in 2020 and was very specific to the year. I feel like birthdays are back. If you want one, you can have one; I’m not depriving people of joy. The whole idea of the title with that one was that 2020 didn’t feel like a year for celebrating very much because so much happened and there was just so much death, which, you know…if it’s the opposite of birth, it certainly outweighed it that year…I mean, literally, you couldn’t celebrate things in person, but also, you didn’t feel like you wanted to, because there was so much bad stuff happening. I feel like we’ve bounced back a tiny bit from that.
Jonathan: Still recovering definitely.
Rose: I mean, it’s kind of one of those gray areas, like we’re just kind of left to the wolves by our government and shit.
Logan: So yeah, let’s celebrate some birthdays while we have some left.
11. ” America is garbage. Celebrity is dead. Rich people are villains. Politicians are heartless. Cops are hands of fascism. We save us. We protect us. We keep us safe” – Could you elaborate more on this statement from your single “Crocodile Tears?”
Logan: No. (laughs)
Carter: Were those lyrics in your song?
Logan: No, I think that might’ve been something I wrote when I released it.
Jonathan: I thought it was lyrics for a second, and I was like, “What part is that from?”
Carter: I mean, the points were right.
Logan: Yeah, those bullet points are all essentially in the song. I feel like America sucks and people should not have the level of wealth and power that they have and…it feels like everything’s getting worse all the time, especially in the last few years, but honestly this is the trajectory that we’ve been on for as long as the country has existed, so it’s not new, unfortunately…It’s up to everybody collectively to take care of each other, because the people with the power don’t care.
Rose: Capitalists suck.
Carter: Amen.
Jonathan: Hell yeah.
12. January of this year saw the release of Ok Koala’s debut album “All of it, All At Once.” What was it like to put this album together?
Logan: It was a labor of love over several years. Most of those songs were written around or before the EP came out, so I had a very long time, especially during COVID, to work on them all and make them the way I wanted, so a lot of influences and ideas slipped in that may not have made an appearance if I had rushed the project, so it was definitely a slow burn as far as the creation of that one, but it’s really rewarding to have a full-length thing out now. It’s what I always wanted to do.
13. How can you determine if a human is happy?
Jonathan: There’s no way to tell. It’s all a lie. Everyone’s fucked up. Everyone’s depressed.
Rose: Usually you can tell a person’s happy by the expression that they exert on their face at any given point in time…Also, you can’t really be happy, like you can feel happiness, but that is all it is, is happiness as an emotion, it’s not a –
Carter: Perpetual thing.
Rose: – way of being or something that you are.
Carter: It’s an emotion. It comes and goes.
Rose: And it is somewhat of a…People talk about, like, “Oh it’s fucking semantics and shit,” but it’s like, “Are you feeling happy?” and “Are you happy?” are two different questions, because –
Jonathan: You can be happy in a situation but not happy overall.
Rose: If a person is happy generally more often than they are sad, then I guess you could say that they are happy, but they’re not actually happiness, you know what I mean? They’re a person that can feel pain and that can change any second.
Logan: On the subject of pain, I feel like a quick way to determine if someone is happy is just punch them and then they’re not anymore. Even if they were, now you know for sure that they’re not.
14. If pigs could fly where does Ok Koala think would they go?
Carter: Mars.
Jonathan: Shit, I think they just wanna get away, you know? They just don’t wanna be bacon. They just wanna live.
Logan: They’re just singing “Fly Away” by Lenny Kravitz as they’re flying into the sunset.
Jonathan: They’re just trying to go, you know? Trying to go to the mountains, hang out with the boars, and then turn into giant boar pigs like their ancestors.
Rose: I think that they would fly to Britain because they wanna be on the Great British Bacon Show.
15. What is next for Ok Koala?
Jonathan: MONEY! Just kidding.
Logan: Yes, profit.
Jonathan: Blink-182 world tour.
Carter: Green Day cover band.
Rose: Legislation against some group of people that don’t like OK Koala .
Logan: We’re a dictatorship now.
Jonathan: Or you just punch them in the face!
Rose: We’re punching people in the face now, that’s what we’re doing.
Jonathan: We’re talking about pigs and now we’re here.
Logan: We’re hoping to record more. We have the one song that we’ve been playing live a little bit that’ll be coming out on a compilation at some point soon. Hopefully we’ll be, at some point in the next year probably, working on some more songs for a future longer release, but in the meantime, just playing some gigs, playing a festival in September, and just…vibing.
Rose: Woo-hoo.
Jonathan: Vibes.
Logan: Yee-haw.
16. Where can readers listen to your music?
Logan: Search “OK Koala” on all of your favorite streaming platforms – Spotify, Apple Music/iTunes, YouTube, etc. All of our music (including some exclusive releases) and our merch are available on https://ok-koala.bandcamp.com, and you can follow us @okkoalamusic on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Tumblr.
Music Shelf With Mustard 