What OK Go’s Damian Kulash Can’t Live Without

Nobody wants to think about toilet paper, but more than that, you don’t want to have to go get toilet paper, and you really don’t want to be without toilet paper. And so if it would just show up at your house, that would be perfect. And luckily it can. I’m sure there are other toilet-paper-subscription services, but what’s also nice is that this brand is sustainable. You can choose bamboo or 100 percent recycled paper. I think they give 50 percent of their profits to clean water and sanitation NGOs. It feels like it’s something I didn’t want to think about in the first place, but it’s nice to check it off in a way that I feel good about. They come in all paper instead of plastic, which is nice, and they have very pretty designs on them, so it’s okay to leave them just sitting out.

They’re these beautiful art-object style power strips. I’m not a person who feels like I need design objects in my life all the time, but it’s basically a battle against the charging cables. They will always win because I care more about being able to access my digital life than I do about a non-messy house. This was just a chance thing, but I bought this fancy power strip on a whim and then realized when I put it next to my bed it contained that horrible feeling of the mess. Because even though the cords are also there, the fact that I’m not plugging into a crappy Home Depot piece of plastic somehow was like — it bounded the whole thing and it was like, yes, chaos lives here, but the world’s okay. There’s just a good feeling to something being made of powder-coated aluminum. It’s beautiful. I think I first saw them at Restoration Hardware or something like that, ten or 15 years ago. I have since ordered more. I have a music studio, and there’s thousands of outlets in there and they’re just utilitarian. But in the places where I have to plug things in and out all day long, I want to feel like life is solid and not made of plastic.

This is on my cable line of thinking. This is really for audio people, but it took me a long time to learn that you need to get good cables. I’m such a hoarder with studio stuff; I’m always worried that I’m not going to have the one thing I need, so I leave all the broken stuff around thinking, “I’m going to one day fix this.” I have overflowing cabinets of broken stuff. There’s nothing worse than having your creativity shut off by trying to fix the tech. It’s not always a broken cable, but it’s astounding how many times it is.

Getting high-quality cables that aren’t going to break is the move. And they actually do sound better. I am not enough of an audiophile to be like, “Ooh, can you hear the difference?” But the thing is, someone forced me to A/B them once, and you can tell the difference. It’s crazy. They’re just really well-built. They’re really well insulated, so they buzz less. The shielding on them is of a higher-grade material. When a guitar cable or microphone cable costs $90 instead of $20, it’s like, “Why would I do that?” Especially if you’re 23 and can’t spend money on anything. Except, I still have all those cables from when I was 23, and at some point I realized I’d rather have five cables that work every time than 50 that don’t.

I stopped eating gluten when a doctor gave me a blood test and was like, “You have seven of 12 antibodies to gluten, which means your body’s fighting it at a celiac level. You’re not celiac, but you should really stop.” I’ve never had any stomach problems or GI issues so I thought,That can’t be true.He was like, just give it a break for a month and see what happens. It used to be that, for me, after lunch, if I didn’t have three cups of coffee, I would fall over asleep, and that went away. My mood swings went away, my ability not to get irritated and stuff — it was a real game changer. So whatever it was in gluten, I had to stop. I love to cook and eat pasta, and most gluten-free noodles are like, eh, at best. All of the ones in this line are great, but the tagliatelle is eggier and more like real fettuccine; it’s so good. It makes me not at all sad that I don’t have gluten anymore. Pizza is still a problem; I still haven’t really had great pizza since then.

APC jeans to me are like the platonic ideal of jeans. I have almost-7-year-old twins, so between that and the rise of online shopping, I just don’t go into retail stores at all. It’s, like, problem-level. I used to discover stuff and think,Ooh, I could be that.And now I have a uniform: It’s jeans and T-shirts, sometimes a button-down, especially if I’m in New York. Knowing the jeans you like — thank God that they don’t change them too often. They did change once maybe ten years ago. I used to like New Cure H, but they don’t make those anymore. Now it’s New Standard, which I think is basically the same. I used to get the dark wash and wear them in the hard-living way, and it did make absolutely perfect jeans, but you have to suffer through a bunch of time doing that. Those sorts of affectations are not available to me as a parent anymore. But I have one pair of the hard dark-wash ones that I wear when I feel like I need to be fancier than the schlub and not quite suit-level. So I have the respectable pair, but I wear them twice a year.

This is a coffee additive. I like coffee a lot, but I would not describe myself as a coffee snob because real coffee snobs all like things that I don’t. But I do really need my coffee every day, and this is a really good way to make sure that I take my supplements because I am happy to skip breakfast. Often I forget everything in my life except my coffee. It has L-theanine, collagen, and other stuff in ut. It’s sort of cinnamon-y. It does add something to your coffee, so there are days when I won’t do it when I really want the coffee black.

This is a commercial carbonator that they have at bars. I stopped drinking, and now I drink a lot of soda water. I respect the idea, but SodaStream does not work for me. The cartridges are ridiculously expensive. Mostly, though, it’s the bottle size. I drink it in enough volume that it’s just too much work, and you keep running out of it. Anyhow, it dawned on me one day that there are dive bars all over the place that have a soda gun. If they can have it, I can have it. So I bought a used carbonator off of eBay and I was like, “We’re done.” It turns out you also need a chiller in line; now I have soda water taps in my house. One of my two kids only drinks soda water because he thinks it comes out of the faucet because it does. Maybe he should be raised differently, but it is such a delight. Also, it meant that we could do all the filtering and everything before, so the water’s clean and perfect, and then we carbonate it. I get an industrial size 50-pound tank, and I go through about one a year. I do have two of them, so I just go every two years. Guess how much it costs to get one replaced? Thirty-five bucks.

You couldn’t fit it under a normal sink, but my setup is big enough because there’s this weird utility room under my house. Either Grohe or Kohler makes an under-the-sink one for your sink tap. My dad likes our soda water so much that I got one of those installed at my parents’ house because it fits under the sink. That tank is like five pounds or something. It’s still way better than those tiny ones that come with SodaStream, and it comes out of a faucet, which is nice, but it doesn’t have the same set-it-and-don’t-touch-it-for-two-years like I do.

Raising kids in Southern California — the whole battle is keeping the sunscreen on all the time. Even for myself, I am not very good about it, and having kids reminds me to put it on. Finding healthy sunscreen is hard. I like this one because it comes in a little stick that you can easily put on. I’m sure there are other great ones out there, but in terms of things we couldn’t live without, I go through this all day long.

It’s a physical spin-art tray that’s meant for schools. It’s big and circular and perfect and they sellpaperfor it. It’s just like the most fun art toy you can imagine. I was at a birthday party for another little kid, and they had one of those three-inch ones. I was running it for the kids, but I was having more fun than they were. We’ve made record covers with the one that I have at home. It is so fun. Me and my kids will just sit there playing and painting for hours on end. It’s the best. It’s all hand-cranked and really well built. In fact, I broke the belt on the underside of mine and was able to replace it. It’s a good, solid art-making machine, which, for a kid, that’s the most amazing thing. The discs are about 14 inches across, so space-wise, it’s easier to spread out outside.

The Environmental Working Group app is a lifesaver because I am such a sucker for marketing. If something says it’s regenerative and healthy and nontoxic, I’m like, “Oh, great.” The EWG has this unbelievable database of cleaning products, foods, cosmetics, and stuff. They run tests on products to show exactly what’s in it and how bad it is for you or for the environment. They give them ratings on five or ten different axes.

The app has a little scanner you can use to scan the barcode on an item. It’s astonishing how many times I’ve been in the health-food store and see something that’s draped in all the right buzzwords, and it turns out that the store brand is actually way healthier and less toxic. They also have these lists that are super useful. We all know that the word organic may not mean very much. But it turns out organic strawberries, you really do need to eat. Organic really matters for strawberries because apparently the average non-organic strawberry has something like 20 different pesticides on it. It’s insane. On the other hand, avocados, absolutely fine to eat. Having a guide that keeps that out of my brain so I don’t have to try to memorize that stuff has been wildly useful and saved me a lot of times.

Extrabar coffee is the type of coffee I like. I think it is only imported by this placePasquiniin L.A. A friend of mine was starting a bar in L.A. maybe 25 years ago, and I remember she spent a day tasting all the various commercially available espressos and was like, “This is the clear winner.” And so I was like, “Okay, I’ll order that.” I liked it and I’ve never gone back. I don’t know if this is true, but at least back then, in the world market, the best coffee beans got sold to Italy and Europe in general first, which is partly why imported coffee sometimes tastes so much better. This is lower in caffeine, and not as dark roast as other espressos, but I love it.

You have kids, so I don’t know if this has happened to you, but I love to cook and I used to cook all the time, but all of that energy shifted to being with the kids and sometimes cooking for them but rarely ever cooking for myself. And so frequently, my dinner is eating peanut butter out of a jar. I know that that’s supposed to be a sign of depravity, but I now love it so much that I care how good the peanut butter is. And this one’s really good. There are two in the running for me: this one and a Georgia-based one called Georgia Grinders. It’s crunchy in just the right way. Super important to me that you not get the no-stir stuff because it all has palm oil and it’s gross. It’s the right amount of salt. All you need is peanuts and salt. And this is the one. I do like it crunchy. I realized that that texture makes kind of a big difference. Ice cream, same way actually. They need to add a sparkle of crunch, not like a hunk of thing in there. The crunch of this peanut butter is not aggressive — it’s playful. The spoon thing I recognize is not for everybody, but I’m just cards on the table, man, this is the day I go clean.

You know what’s really good is banana, peanut butter, and honey on toast. For me it has to be gluten-free toast, sadly. And fennel seeds, even turmeric. You wouldn’t expect that, right? The fennel just makes it feel like it’s a little grown-up. Someone once made this at a diner and I remember asking, “How did you decide this?” And they’re like, “I read that it was good for you.” And I was like, “You read that this combination was good for you?” They’re like, “No, the fennel was good for you.” I was like, “So you put it in your peanut butter?” It does the thing, you know, how that little effervescence of rosemary or thyme in lemonade makes you feel all grown-up? That’s what fennel does to your peanut butter.