Alternative, Featured | Meet Great Good Fine Ok, Your Soundtrack to Summer

Posted by admin on June 2, 2014

By: Annie Dineen

If you’ve danced it out to a funky synth line, tested the limits of your shower’s resonance with high notes, or dabble in keytar solos, you’ll love Great Good Fine Ok. Made of creamy-smooth falsettos and hip-shaking synth beats you won’t need a degree in twerking to dance to, Great Good Fine OK is the indie-synth-pop ice cream bar dipped in R&B syrup that you’ll be craving all summer.

I spoke to the band before their show at Baby’s All Right, a colored light infused venue in Brooklyn replete with elaborate drawings spanning the walls and copper crocodiles carrying incandescent orbs in their mouths. The exuberant twenty-somethings, fresh off a few of their first shows ever at South by Southwest, were particularly excited to be opening for Tove Lo, the Swedish pop goddess whose affinity for black mesh shirts and eating dinner in bathtubs has met with massive recent success. “We’re both big fans of Tove Lo, we’ve been listening to a lot of her,” they tell me. “It’s funny cuz we actually are fans of her, we’re not just saying that.”

Great Good Fine OK is Jon Sandler and Luke Moellman, two Brooklynites who, despite growing up a town apart in upstate New York, didn’t meet until moving to Brooklyn. “We worked together on a couple musical projects, and I was saying some day we should write a song together and it just like, never happened for a while. Then one day we ran into each other on the street like after months of not seeing each other and we were like let’s do this, let’s write a song. That night he sent me the music to “You’re the One for Me” and the next day I wrote the lyrics and the melody to it, kinda sent it back and forth, and we were kinda like ‘oh shit, we have something here.’”

Though they often finish each other’s sentences, Jon taking the lead as they talk and Luke filling in to expand or clarify, when it comes to songwriting, they’d rather be far apart.

“We’re rarely in the same room when we write,” Jon says. “Luke is the producer/engineer and writes. The formula we’ve been working on is…” Luke picks up the slack. “I’ll like write the music to it, the instruments, everything, and then give it to Jon and he comes up with the melody and the lyrics and then sends it back and he’ll have comments about what I did and I’ll have comments about what he did. That’s sort of the formula, that’s what’s been working for us, and it’s really awesome because we both get to focus on what we feel like we’re best at.”

“It’s cool,” they say of their hyper-2014 digital songwriting sessions. “You can sort of turn off the part of your brain that’s really critical if there’s nobody else around.”

The sound that emerges is heavily pop, often compared to artists like Passion Pit or M83. I ask them to describe their sound. “I think the most accurate things people have said is that it’s like a mix between synth pop and R&B,” they tell me. “We’re using a lot of elements that are in Passion Pit and M83 and all these comparisons we’re getting. At the same time, I feel like we’re a little more influenced by more classic 70’s and 80’s.. Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson. So any description that combines those two worlds is really cool and it is really hard to verbalize.”

“Our favorite descriptor we got was that somebody called us ‘PBR Kelly’. Isn’t that amazing? We’ve talked about it a lot. I hope the people that wrote it know that we love it.”

I ask them what they’ve been listening to lately. “I have a car so I listen to a ton of top 40 radio, so I can tell you exactly what I like in the top 40 world,” Jon says, laughing. “I like that Paramore song “Ain’t It Fun,” I like the new Justin Timberlake jam [“Not A Bad Thing”] – it’s amazing! My favorite band in the world is Steely Dan, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that from the type of music we play.”

Dreams for the future? “I always say this and I think it bothers Luke,” Jon says. “But I would love to go on tour with a big pop artist like Lady Gaga, somebody like that who does kind of artistic things within the pop. Does it bother you?” Luke retains a stoic poker face. “I always say Lady Gaga because like while she writes pop songs and she’s like on Top 40 radio, I feel like it’s how in that respect she’s kind of trying to be creative, not just in the confines of a pop machine.”

“It would be extravagant. Lights, smoke, maybe some fire. Fire mostly shooting out of Luke’s instruments.”

Luke laughs. “I’m beginning to warm to the idea. No pun intended.”

So start practicing your #bodydiamond (no, they did not explain), and get ready to fall in love with the infectious groove of Great Good Fine OK. With or without pyrotechnics, they’re lighting a spark in the pop scene.