Andrew WK interview
HUCK caught up with the New York City dude of rock ahead of his Close Calls With Brick Walls album release to talk about the new balance in his life, staying positive and partying hard.
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Andrew WK is a man of many sides. He may have made his name as the embodiment of goofball rock positivity, penning party anthems that were featured on Jackass as well as numerous video games and TV shows, but the NYC-based hedonist changed course in 2005. He cleaned up, embarked on a self-help spoken word tour and became oddly cryptic about his former persona.
Conspiracy theories snowballed: 'Andrew WK pre and post 2005 are different people!', 'fraud!' and 'the role was invented by Dave Grohl and auditioned for!'. Andrew conceded to and denied the accusations in equal parts causing complete identity confusion. But one thing's for sure, the 30-year-old is a performance artist who thrives off the controversy he inevitably courts. Whether his act is parody, or not, it doesn't matter. The passion and enthusiasm with which he realises it is 100 per cent genuine.
HUCK: How are your live shows going at the moment?
Andrew WK: They’ve been going really well thank you. I’ve had a really nice, diverse range of performance opportunities over the past five years; playing in my full band in traditional concerts, playing solo shows, playing with other groups and playing with a string quartet called the Calder Quartet. I think that variety really is the spice of life. I’ve definitely experienced more extreme all-or-nothing versions of performance but now I like to mix it up, not only for my audience but also for me as a performer. I want to keep myself entertained.
Do you prefer working solo or collaborating?
I’ve definitely done more work on my own but over the years, I’ve grown more excited by the ideas that other people have. I guess I always felt I had the need to get my ideas out there because I hadn’t had the chance to do so. Now that I’ve had that opportunity and established myself as a separate entity, it’s very exciting for me to see the world through the eyes of other people and hear their ideas, creative or otherwise. It’s really become a balance for me. From 2000 to 2005, I didn’t want to work with anybody else, I didn’t want to perform with anybody else and I didn’t want to make music with anybody else. I wanted to completely do what I had in my head and put that out there. Once it was out there I think it really allowed me to take a breath and then open up to all the other possibilities in the world.
What changed then in 2005?
Once you make a name for yourself, you’ve got a better foundation from which to offer your services to someone else or with which someone can offer their services to you. I mean I’ve got to meet so many people and do so many things because of what I’ve done with Andrew WK. [...] I’m very grateful for the opportunities that have come my way and I want to make the best of them. […] Usually, in a very organic way, things have developed out of a commitment to only do my own thing and I think that’s an interesting phenomenon. I’m really trying to have a balance in my life now and have as much variety as possible.
But do you ever worry about staying relevant? Your music in the past has been about youth and fun, is that going to change as you get older?
I definitely haven’t thought about it that much maybe because I feel like this is still new to me or that I am still very young. A lot of great people are still doing what they love to do into their 70s. Whether it’s Lee Scratch Perry or one of my vocal teachers who is 93. And she’s on fire, you know?! She’s not thinking that she’s not relevant at any point. So I think that the thing that’s most important to me is to keep on exploring the world through my work and I don’t want to ever get caught into some kind of pattern where I can’t take risks anymore. The only way you can stay relevant is to stay relevant to your own interests and your own excitement, your own feelings about the world. If you close yourself off from that, not only are you not going to be relevant to the society or culture at large, you won’t even be relevant to yourself. I’m still alive! I don’t wanna just become like an institution and die, I gotta keep this thing moving along so that it stays interesting to my audience, but also to me. The most important person for me to stay relevant to is myself.
Are you going to be performing until you’re 93?
I would love to be able to do that, as long as my body holds up. I’ve performed in wheelchairs before so if I find myself in a wheelchair at that age, I will still go on! And why not, right? None of us should ever stop doing what we love and there’s a lot of really old fogey performers still going.
Who was inspirational to you growing up and who’s inspirational to you now?
Who I think of as inspirational are the people close to me. People that I have really learned from at a close distance. I generally admire all kinds of great people that maybe I don’t have that kind of access to, someone like Michael Jordan or Martin Scorsese. I mean, they are great talents but when I was growing up, they were removed from my up close and personal experience. Therefore, I really started to idealise and look up to and try to get inspiration from people who were near me. So the older kids in my school, other musicians, people generally in South East Michigan. There was so much going on, so much excitement, it was so powerful to me that my favourite musicians could actually be going to my school.
Is that something you'd like to be to your fans?
I think that’s a really noble pursuit to provide other people with the kind of mind-expanding experiences that I had as a young person. I got really hooked on having my mind blown. People who could teach me new things or show me a new experience in the world really held the key to that mind-blowing experience. I’d love to be able to provide that and I hope to be providing that for other young people in the same way as it was provided for me. I guess the best thing is to live by example. The people I was looking up to were people who lived and did what they wanted. And that doesn’t mean the music I make sounds like the music they made but the spirit that they do what they believe in, that they follow their dreams, that they do it with a completely committed uncompromising spirit. And when you grow up, seeing people live like that it makes you believe in your mind that its possible.
Why do you think that some people grow up and become disconnected from that spirit but you have managed to hold onto it?
I mean it’s a struggle everyday. I have moments of frustration but I never lose those kinds of driving emotions. I think it’s hard to get bitter or angry if you’re grateful and I have so much to be grateful for. I don’t even mean in my career so much but having friends and family that I love, and that love me. They give you that foundation so that you can go out into the world and go on these adventure. [...] It’s a dream come true for me and when you have a bunch of your dreams come true it’s very hard to be in anything other than a good mood.
Your new record Close Calls With Brick Walls came out in limited countries in 2006. How does it feel to re-release it internationally?
I’m just really, really happy that it’s out. And for me, that’s so I can move forward. This album, it really was that feeling of cleaning out my life from, well, almost my entire career and finally getting everything out there so that I could move forward to the future. I’m again just very grateful because the stars really aligned to even allow me to release this album after all these years. It was released in Asia, South Korea, Japan and in a very limited way in the US, and it’s always been my dream, but now after dealing with a lot of red tape and business issues, everything’s been resolved and in a lot of ways I’m in a better position than I’ve ever been in my whole career. I’m here to say ‘hey there’s going to be more happening in the next two years then there has been in the last six, so get ready’.
Can you tell me a bit about the Santos Party House?
This is the biggest project I’ve probably ever been involved in, in terms of the amount of work, time, money, the number of people involved and the skill of the project. This is a two-floor 8000 square foot concert hall and studio nightclub that me and my friends opened in downtown Manhattan, New York City. Basically this was one of the main reasons that I stopped touring full time in 2005. Before then I didn’t have a house, I was just playing a show every single night and touring non-stop, year out. But my friends came to me and said ‘hey we’re thinking of getting a group of guys together and opening this club, do you wanna be a part of it?’ And it was so over-the-top and such an unreasonable idea that I said ‘yeah, I gotta do this. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity'. It took five years to open and won every award that we could possibly win and has had the greatest parties and greatest shows I’ve ever seen. I mean we built the place from scratch. We didn’t just move into some other bar and change the name we had to get a liquor license we had to build it up brick by brick. But it’s the most rewarding experience ever as well because we’re giving back. We’re serving the city now, the community that has given so much to me. And New York City, really the more you give to it, the more you get back, like so many great big cities.
So did you create it as a hub for your community?
Well, the thing with New York is it’s the world community. When you do something in New York, you feel like you’re working on the world stage, on a global level. And it was just the idea that having travelled so much and played in so many venues, and been in so many clubs, if we could just have our own, how would we make it? We wanted to make a place that was a physical embodiment of good will, joy, excitement and fun.
You’re doing so much stuff, is there anything that ties the Andrew WK world together?
Yeah, and I think about this a lot. I try to make sure I’m not being spread too thin because the thing that runs through all of it is one, it’s all stuff I love to do. It’s very organic, it just comes from the fact I enjoy life. But two, it’s all entertainment. Whether it’s performing on TV, running the record label and producing music for other people, my own musical performances, the music venue or doing interviews like this, it all connects very clearly under the idea of entertainment. Which is very manageable. Usually, one opportunity springs out of another. If I was doing this and then also working with gorillas in the jungle, making automobiles and building a tree house, then that would be very hard for me to imagine.
Close Calls With Brick Walls is out now on Steev Mike Records.
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Andrew WK interview (text) by Shelley Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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