Andrew W.T.F

“I love tourists,” Andrew W. K. said as he strolled by Times Square on Monday. “They’re excited about everything, and I love excitement.”

No kidding. Mr. W. K. — the initials stand for his real last name, Wilkes-Krier — is a connoisseur of excitement, as anyone who has seen his hair-flinging performances or videos can attest. Lately he’s been exuberant about ideas, like the nature of coincidences and paradoxes and solipsism. Also pancakes. Over lunch near his apartment in Midtown, he ordered a stack of blueberry-banana-chocolate-chip-walnut, a blend of every flavor the restaurant offered — and slowly made a mash of them as he talked about his new passion: thinking.

He has been reading the works of the philosopher Martin Buber, among others, and contemplating consciousness. “I have been very into the idea that the only way the external world exists is by you observing it, and that the only way you can interact with that external world through that observation is to intend it to be,” he said, his eyes closed in concentration. He opened them to eat observably a strip of bacon.

Known mainly for his good-time anthems — his most popular include frat-boy classics like “It’s Time to Party,” “Party Hard” and “Party Til You Puke” — and for wearing head-to-toe white, Mr. W. K., 27, has recently decided to sell himself as an idea man.

Over the last year he has been rejecting concert requests in favor of giving talks on topics of his own devising. On Monday he will perform the first third of a nine-hour extemporaneous lecture cycle called “The Joy Trilogy” at a small comedy theater in Chelsea, and on Friday he will discuss “pure fun and total love” at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Tex.

Next month he is to embark on Andrew W. K.’s High-Way Party Cruiser Tour, traveling in a Cadillac, giving addresses and putting on parties at clubs across parts of the West Coast and Canada.

Colleges are calling; a book is in the works. His appeal is strong enough that his first such gig, at New York University in November, packed an 860-seat auditorium for what was, essentially, a four-hour Q & A. (There was also an impromptu singalong to his song “I Love NYC.”)

“It’s become a certifiable skill that I could offer, which is to just appear,” Mr. W. K. said. “I wanted me to be the focus, rather than what I did. And that’s the exact opposite of how I thought of it before: I wanted to be very secondary to the music.” He’s not quite a guru (though he does have the wardrobe), but Mr. W. K. now welcomes the idea that he is a motivational speaker, not just a musician.

“People have been saying all along, ‘Yeah, the music’s great, but I really like this feeling, it inspires me, it makes me feel like I can do anything,’ ” he said. “I’ve had people say, ‘I don’t really listen to your music, but I read an interview and it made me feel good; I really understood and I could relate to what you were talking about.’ That to me is just as inspiring, because it’s all just expression. What I would really like it to be is that I just show up, and whether it’s a concert or it’s talking, the same essential experience is available.”

His path to enlightenment was properly informal: He moved to New York from Ann Arbor, Mich., at 18 to pursue music. He established his fun-loving cred in 2002 with his first album, “I Get Wet,” which has sold nearly 250,000 copies. He toured widely until 2004, always appearing onstage in a dingy white T-shirt, white jeans, sneakers and a watch.

Subsequent albums of nonparty songs and metal-like ballads have not been nearly as successful, but 20-something truth-seekers are not made for stasis. Mr. W. K. busied himself with other projects: opening a club on Lafayette Street in SoHo (it won’t be ready for at least six months, but the T-shirts are already done); performances and writing for musicians from Will Oldham to Hanson; an advice column for a magazine in Japan, where he’s still quite popular; and an advice reality show on MTV, “Your Friend, Andrew W. K.”

At 6 foot 3, with shaggy hair past his shoulders and boyishly chiseled features, he has the charisma of a quirky campus leader. The outfits help. “There is something about white clothes; you’re more aware of your body,” Mr. W. K. said. “The original idea was just to be blank, and T-shirts and jeans were the most basic clothes, I thought.” (Of course now they have become his trademark. “Trying to represent nothing is the ultimate paradox,” he sighed.)

For their part, club managers are happy to have him, not least as an oddity.

“It’s a real experiment,” said Kevin Allison, the artistic director of the Peoples Improv Theater in Chelsea, where Mr. W. K. will perform “The Joy Trilogy.” “He was really intrigued by the whole idea of just get up and let whatever comes out, come out. From our end, we’re just as curious to see what happens, as I think he is.”

In a preview performance Mr. W. K. answered a question that had been posed to him on his Web site, andrewwk.com: “Why are you so stupid?” He spoke for 20 minutes, touching on his music (“I wrote a song a few years ago called ‘Totally Stupid’ ”) and knowledge (“The very idea of knowing seems almost impossible”), concluding that he preferred being in “a state of unknowing.”

That lack of shame, coupled with his apparently limitless ability to ad-lib, will be put to use at South by Southwest, where he will anchor coverage for DirecTV. Unsurprisingly, another reality show is scheduled for the fall.

Of course, even the most minimally cynical observer might wonder whether Mr. W. K.’s persona is an act, an elaborate piece of performance art meant to sell records. (He has three coming out, including a solo piano album.) But if it is — and that charge has plagued this seemingly irony-free performer since he was just a Wilkes-Krier — it’s a good one.

“I’ve definitely grappled with, what is it to have fun?” he said in his loft apartment, which he shares with his fiancée, his best friend and a concert grand piano. “I think having fun can be an all-the-time thing when you’re doing exactly what you want to do. But that can take a whole lifetime and then some. I’m working towards that. Am I having fun right now? I’m not not having fun. But is it fun?”

the author's credulous tone and boilerplate Timesese are as ridiculous as Mr. W-K's philosophizing

Martin Buber
First published Tue Apr 20, 2004; substantive revision Tue Jan 23, 2007

The work of the prolific essayist, translator, and editor Martin Buber (1878-1965) is predominantly dedicated to three areas: the philosophical articulation of the dialogic principle (das dialogische Prinzip), the revival of religious consciousness among the Jews (by means of the literary retelling of Hasidic tales and an innovative German translation of the Bible), and to the realization of this consciousness through the Zionist movement. Such was the power of his spoken and written word that during the First World War many young men wrote to him for guidance in difficult moral, religious, and political crises. His answers were seen as those of an authority who rose above the ideologies of the day. A man of considerable organizational talent, Buber shunned responsibility for the nascent political institutions of Zionism. Instead, he attempted to transform the Zionist movement by articulating what he saw as its unique historic mission: the realization of a Hebraic humanism (Grete Schaeder). His advocacy of a binational solution to the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine is widely considered to be an indication of the political utopianism Buber developed together with his friend Gustav Landauer, an aesthetic politics shaped in the anarchist and religious socialist movements of the first two decades of the twentieth century.

A selection of Buber's works, edited by him in his eighties, comprises more than four thousand pages and is divided into writings on philosophy, the Bible, Hasidism, and (published posthumously) Judaism. There are several volumes of published letters, and the Bible translation begun with Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) and completed after WWII is still widely used by German Christian ministers who appreciate its poetic language. A complete edition of Buber's works, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Peter Schäfer, is forthcoming.

"I just paradoxed myself right out of understanding what I was talking about. [grins]"

Wonderful. Andrew talked like this when I got to inteview him in Feb or Mar 2002; it was immediately obvious that he had more going on than some people wanted to allow, and that he was going to try and do his "work" on multiple levels so that it could appeal to as many people in as many ways as possible. It also was clear that he could really really TALK and enjoyed doing it: another rarity in musicians.

Anyways -- few deeper thinking people in the mainstream Western philosophical discourse have successfully philosophized at length about joy, happiness, life, love... (Foucault? Derrida? Lacan? Debord? Rorty? PRETTY GRIM TIMES DUDE.) You've usually got to dig a bit further (Gurdjieff, R.A. Wilson, I dunno) or head East to get to contemplations of ecstasy. Or: Buber! A politically active utopian and deep thinker. Awesome that Andrew knows about him. But: of course he does!

i'm sorry to be a pedant and he sounds like a cool guy, but from the looks of it Buber wasn't doing any philosophy at all. why on earth would you compare him to Rorty?

kinda besides the point which is the awesomeness of the Andrew WK Project.

You've usually got to dig a bit further (Gurdjieff, R.A. Wilson, I dunno)

I did "the work" for a spell, and Gurdjieff is definitely much lighter -- and often comical in a very obscure way -- than his pal Ouspenksy, but at the same time, joy isn't the first word that comes to mind when thinking about Gurdjieff's path.

Andrew and G. in a room together:

A: I GET WET!
G: What's this "I"? You can't speak for "I"; you're a robot with multiples I's, a robot with multiple I's that are all asleep. Before you can say "I," and before you can say "I GET WET," you first must wake yourself up. This takes long, hard work and will probably never come. You will probably never wake up.

Colin Wilson's The New Existentialism, great book. This is a great read about the importance of happiness and joy and meaning.

Andrew WK did an instore on halloween a few years ago at a CD store I worked at. The minimum length of his "autograph" was a paragraph, and he often wrote quite a bit more. I had him sign a unicorn outfit I was going to wear that night, and he wrote some run-on sentence that began with "Zach, the second you stick this plush unicorn on your head is when the party begins..." and went on and on and on after that. He's a really nice guy.

whatever happened with those websites that claimed andrew wk was a fake and or batshit insane?

I only did a short phoner with him once but I like him lots. He got bonus points for having in his band the drummer from Obituary (in fact, he semi-unintentionally helped forge the band's reunion a couple years back when he got the guys onstage at a Florida gig together at a Florida Ozzfest date as he joined them in loving renditions of classic Obituary tracks) and especially guitarist Jimmy Coup from one of the most criminally underachieving metal groups Coup De Grace. I believe I will start a thread about them now...

Feb 24, 2002 interview transcript - slightly edited -- piece ended up in LAWeekly

Jay Babcock: WHAT CAN PEOPLE EXPECT WHEN YOU PLAY AT THE WHISKEY?
ANDREW W.K.: Expect nothing, hope for the best. Come knowing that what you’re gonna see is quite simply the result of seven or eight people doing what they love to do, which is play these songs and really put an honest effort to include everybody, to have fun. I don’t know what people should expect. What usually happens is people come and by the end of the show they’re smiling. I don’t know why. I just hope that that’s what we can do. Please come to have fun, and be happy, and know that things are going to be okay. My goal is to make people happy.

WHAT DOES ‘I GET WET’ MEAN? IT’S A WEIRD THING FOR A MAN TO SAY--
The clear basis of it is: In the ocean of life, you can stand on the shore or you can dive in. I choose to dive in and get wet. I wanna be in the midst. I wanna be living. I wanna be in the midst of LIFE. We’re only just getting going here...Let me say this. The word ‘party’, to me, includes more people and more things and more possibilities, includes MORE than any other word I can really think of. It’s about celebrating everything you see in front of you, everything that you see behind you, and everything that ever has existed, could exist and does exist. It’s about being not mindlessly happy, but in fact solidly okay, and feeling good about everything. Everybody is invited to this party, unconditionally, without any guidelines, without any rules, things you have to think, be like, do, act like... You don’t have to drink alcohol or do drugs to be invited to this party. You can drink alcohol and do heroin and be the biggest junkie in the world and be invited as well. There’s nothing you need to do or not do except be yourself, to be part of this. This is for human beings. We’re celebrating the excitement of being alive and the potential that all humans have to do and be great things.

HOW OLD ARE YOU?
22.

22... WHERE IS ALL THIS PHILOSOPHY STUFF COMING FROM?
Philosophy?!? I see it as the truth. The truth is that there’s nothing to be afraid of. The truth is that the world is big and mysterious and explosive, and that no matter how hard we try... Okay, let me explain it like this. When I, and most people I think, are young, the world is full of mystery and it’s exciting. Then you become a teenager and I think it’s just because chemicals are released in the brain, you realize that you don’t know everything and that you can’t control everything and everything is sorta out of your immediate grasp. The way a lot of people, including me, deal with that is holding on to everything for dear life. Cuz what you see is a big black hole. And you’re like, Wow that big black hole looks like Nothing. It’s just empty and black and you hold on for dear life to all these things. When in fact the black hole contains everything! Is everything. ALL THINGS. And through summing up, through the pursuit of knowing everything,.. I wanted to know everything when I was a teenager, and say, ‘Oh yeah, I know that, yeah yeah yeah,” ...I was on top of everything, everything was below me, not like I was better than it, but it was like nothing’s a surprise, everything was below me, that wasn’t always the case, but that was often the case. I felt most comfortable that way. I felt like I was holding on -- and not falling into that void. Well, the minute I let go a little bit, as I got older, because I realized I couldn’t know everything, I sort of let it go, falling into that void, and of course, it turns out that in that void is actually everything. And what an exciting thing to let life be big and exciting and that I don’t have everything figured out and I don’t wrap things up in two words, I don’t want to know the answer of everything or have it all explained to me either, I wanna let it wash over me like at the ocean, and come to me, be endlessly deep, deeper and more expansive on all sides than I can see, and I want it to exist above me. I feel that this music as well as everything else in life is much bigger than me--YET I can own it and it’s inside of me. I can possess it. It belongs to me. But on that same token, as much as it’s mine, it’s something I can’t control and keep to myself, or understand or possess entirely. [coughs] See what I mean? It’s no philosophy or a concept. IT’S THE TRUTH. It’s trying to be strong enough that I can let all my guards down, and let everything come in, and not have to put up walls to protect myself from everything, that I can see all things, and experience them all, as much as possible. It’s probably a fleeting effort. I think to truly be invincible is probably impossible until maybe the day you die, but at least...TRYING to let the world be as big and as open as it can be. And that’s TRUTH. That’s not a philosophy, that’s just the truth. That’s what we’re going for here, is the pursuit of the absolute truth, which by its very nature, I think, is GOOD. That includes the bad and the sad and the ugly, it also includes the happy and the excitement and the good feelings. And if you can live in the world where you’re strong enough and set up enough with things like food and shelter, health and safety then you can really truly enjoy all those elements, even the bad ones, as a sort of amazing emotional experience. A very rich, textured existence.

(cont'd)

Jay Babcock: YOU’RE TRYING TO REACH AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN, RIGHT?
ANDREW W.K.: Yeah.

YET YOU’RE ONE OF THE FEW NEW ROCK ACTS THAT DOESN’T RAP.
Huh. Rap is a great, great, great thing. I feel like I rap in my own way. But the thing is, I really like commitment. So I know there’s no accident. And the whole premise of some things are groove-oriented, and... I just want a commitment, you know what I mean? I think rap is great, one of the greatest things in the world. I can’t do it well, unfortunately. Hope to.

DO YOU THINK YOU’RE BRINGING SOMETHING TO THE CULTURE THAT ISN’T THERE AT THE MOMENT?
No. I’m only reflected what is already there.

DO YOU THINK THAT THERE ARE OTHER ARTISTS WHO ARE DOING THE SAME SORT OF THING YOU’RE DOING?
I do not know. And I don’t know if that’s important. It’s a very good question. I just...don’t know.

DO YOU LISTEN TO THE RADIO A LOT?
Um, sometimes.

YOU’RE AWARE OF...WELL, BASICALLY WHAT I’M GETTING AT IS THAT THE WHOLE CURRENT GEN OF ROCK IS VERY MUCH CONCERNED WITH ANGST, ANGER, DEPRESSION, FEAR. AND THERE’S NOT--
Well I do get a sense that there’s this feeling of, 'Nobody understands me and' ... That seems okay to me because that’s people dealing with real feelings. Sometimes, especially in this country, we’ve strived so hard to make everything good and okay, that there’s these natural human responses, like anger and fear and feeling alone, all these feelings that aren’t really, that we don’t, that we almost have to create situations to feel that way, cuz otherwise you’d never feel that way, and the complacent merry-ness of existence is one-dimensional. Like I was saying: the truth contains all happiness and excitement as well as anger and depression and sadness and confusion, so sometimes you have to search for it and maybe that’s what people are doing. I think that’s excellent, I think that’s great. We need all those things. What I find in it is other things, but... We’re aggressively pursuing feeling good. We’re serious about having fun. This is not a reaction to anything. It’s a reaction to being alive. I think there’s people all over doing great things. I don’t think that anything needs to be saved, or fixed, or things need to be changed, I don’t believe that. There’s always great things happening, there always has been, there always will be. I think that there’s still new frontiers. That’s what I’m doing. I’m going into the future, blazing trails with everybody hand-in-hand, into unexplored, uncharted territory. New horizons. By simply the default fact that I have not existed yet. This is OUR time: what are we gonna do with it?

SOME OF THE LYRICS HAVE THIS WEIRD SLANG. THE USE OF THE VERB, ‘TO KILL.’ WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHEN YOU USE THAT?
“To kill” has many meanings and I’m not using it one way or another. To me, that song, the song ‘Ready to Die,’ is saying, Tomorrow may never come. Um...okay. Imagine this scenario. If we both died right now, and we went to someplace, if there is such a thing, someplace afterwards and we continued our conversation, we’d go Wow wow! I guess it’s all over now. We’re here now but, ... Well that was fun. That was a fun life. Man like, What was I so afraid of? All that stuff I didn’t do cuz I was so afraid. I wish I had done that, I wish I had put more time into that, not been so worried about, not spent my time on Earth dwelling in these other things. So: if tomorrow never comes I wanna know that I’m doing every thing I can today, and be ready to go. If that’s what’s happening. [inaud] grew up not doing stuff. Ready to die. A mindset that allows you to get all that you want out of life, as much as possible, and make all that you can. And just be ready, on a spur of a moment, to do whatever is necessary. [coughs] And other than that, it’s pretty clear. It’s the right time, here we come, join up.

“PEOPLE START KILLING WHENEVER SHE COMES.” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
I do not know. It means everything and nothing.

“GIRLS OWN LOVE.” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
It all kind of makes sense if you know that it’s about being incredibly frustrated about going out of your way to be kind to a girl, and she really could care less. That’s sort of where it all comes from. And that you never really get back anything that you’ve given... [inaud]. It’s about how frustrating it is to be what you think is a good person and have the other person prefer someone you think is not a good person. It’s very basic, real stuff. I love words. I can’t wait to use more words.

YOU CAN PLAY ALL THE INSTRUMENTS.
Yeah I wrote all of the parts, and played all of it at one point and then because of tuning issues and then timing, I just wanted it to be as good as it can be...Sometimes even then it wasn’t good enough, so I’d go back and do it again, more carefully. Whatever it took. Whatever it takes is the mindset. If I can’t do it, then get someone else, and if they couldn’t, then I’d go back somehow and make it right. The only thing I can’t play are the horns.

WHAT WERE YOUR ONE-MAN BAND GIGS LIKE?
It was good. It was really frustrating for me.

YOU COULDN’T’VE BEEN UP THERE ONSTAGE DOING YOUR KICKS AND EVERYTHING...
Oh yeah. I was doing MORE than I do now, trying to compensate for there being nothing else onstage. I’d be so winded from running laps around the stage that I could barely sing. I was really frustrated but again my mindset has been always, I will do whatever it takes. To say No to a show didn’t seem like I’d be doing what it took. So I’d say I’ll play any fucking show, I don’t give a fuck, if it’s for ten people, eight hour busride. I’ve done all of that...for years! And I just knew that eventually, if I continued to work, that things couldn’t help but something would happen, even if it would be that I met someone else. Then there’d be two people, rather than one. I had patience enough that I knew that someday I’d have a band, and now I have an amazing band. It was just a matter of time. It was very frustrating but it was also very fun. It was a lot of fun.

...

I have a lung thing, where I cough. I was on tour for a month and just determined not to get sick. I came away with a cough but other than that I never... Whenever I started feeling sickly, I would do everything I could to not, that doesn’t constitute sick, ... I think it’s so mind-over-matter that really helped. I remember one morning I woke up I had a fever, I said I’m gonna lay in this bed and will it away. And I did and it worked and it was good. By playing shows everynight, moving your blood around like that, just expelling, you work stuff out, it helps. I have a caramel chocolate bar, gonna take a bit of it. You like chocolate?

WHITE CHOCOLATE.
White chocolate? Really. Ah, great! A lot of people HATE white chocolate. You know, it’s the cocoa butter, they take out the actual cocoa. I think whit chocolate is cocoa butter, cream, sugar -- cocoa butter is what they use to make chocolate cream. It’s fasicnating.

HOW MUCH COFFEE DO YOU DRINK A DAY?
Almost none. Very rarely. I didn’t drink coffee for years. Funny you should ask that--today I had coffee. But I never drink coffee--

RED BULL?
Never. I don’t like it...too sweet. I remember having Red Bull when I was in LA cuz it’s so prevalent there. No. I prefer room temperature water. I get on these juice kicks. Everyone used to think something was wrong with me cuz I would drink so much juice. Like a bottle. Like that really good juice. That was like a can of coke for me. Sick! A box of oranges a day.

DO YOU EAT MEAT?
Oh yeah. Everything.

YOU’RE A BIG GUY. DO YOU WORK OUT?
[inaud] to do what I do. Mostly just trying to be the best I can be. I want to be the best I can be for the music and for everybody else. I want to be strong enough that people can feel strong about me. First of all, if I cam across this music, I would dedicate my life to it. Which is a good thing, because I am. On that note, I want to be as strong as possible. Invincible. Anything I can do to further that, I feel furthers the whole thing. It’s not about being weak, you know what I mean?

WHAT IS YOUR MUSIC INSPIRATION? YOU MUST KNOW THAT THE MUSIC YOU MAKE SOUNDS PRETTY MUCH UNLIKE ANYTHING THAT’S COMING OUT RIGHT NOW.
To me it sounds unlike anything I’ve ever heard. When I listen to the song I Get Wet, people compare it to sooooo many different things. I find that very exciting. I feel honored that--

THAT’S A GOOD SIGN--
Yeah. I’m glad you’re saying that. Cuz what I finally realized, maybe you’ll agree, is when people say ‘Ah you know what, it makes me feel like this, it reminds me of this, it makes me think about this,’ what they’re actually doing a lot of times, especially people older than me, they’re remembering when they felt really excited about music. They’re talking about times when they felt really good. People say it sounds like...the Clash. I know NOTHING about the Clash. I couldn’t sing you one song of theirs except the Rockin’ the Casbah song. I know nothing about that band. It was before my time. The stuff I grew up listening to was grindcore. Napalm Death, a band called S.O.B., when I was a teenager I was most passionately, aggressively involved with music, it was basically music that sounded like this: AGGGGGGGGGGGGGH. But again, all the while, I’ve been playing piano since I was little. So. To me, the world, I describe it as a treasure chest, or a buffet. If someone opened the treasure chest and said, Here this is yours, this is life, this is yours. Just open it and say Wow! Here’s gold. Look at this beautiful gold. I want this! I love this! Put it in my pocket. That doesn’t mean that I can’t say OOh diamonds, I want to have these too. And these pearls, and these rubies, and all the other stuff in the treasure chest. Just like at a buffet: I want to have white chocolate, I wanna have caramel chocolate, I wanna have steak, I wanna have cake, I wanna have green beans, I wanna have juice, I wanna have coffee, I want all these things. There’s no one telling me, You can’t have that and that. That can’t be a part of your world. By the nature of being human, everything that can be experienced by human beings, that can be made by humans, is acceptable to me. And I ENJOY it. I want to savor it all. And I want to be strong enough, and I’ve worked at being strong enough over the years to include all of it. Even the things that I don’t like now, I want to work so that I like it. Cuz I LIKE liking things. I feel better when I like things... [inaud] Just through patience, and over time, and really loving people, I’ve even been able to like things that I didn’t like. And you know what? The reasons I didn’t like em were usually pretty stupid. Base on insecurity, and fear, and all those things of my own. The point is, MELODY and EXCITEMENT and ENERGY exists all over the world, in all different ways. That’s what I love, that’s what I’ve been inspired by, that’s what been a part of my music and always will be. And that’s why I can like any song if I like that song. Nobody can tell me You can’t like that song or That’s stupid. If I believe in it and I like it, it’s mine. Even the person who made it can’t make me feel any differerent.

YES. BUT I’VE SEEN NAPALM DEATH. THERE’S NOT A LOT OF MELODY IN THAT MUSIC.
Oh! Are you kidding me? 54,3,2,1 dee-dee-din-di-di. That’s the first song off Harmony Corruption. I can see the whole thing. [rhythm sound] They had to pull [anti-melody] to say that, they calledit Harmony Corruption, YET I could sing you that whole fucking album.

RIGHT BUT IT’S NOT THE BIG POP HOOK.
It’s a melody. Notes in sequence is what constitutes melody.
[interrupted]

I GUESS WHAT I’M SAYING IS, THERE’S A REASON WHY NAPALM DEATH DOESN’T APPEAL TO THAT MANY PEOPLE.
Look at Slipknot! Where do you think they got that?

THEY’RE NOT THAT BIG, THOUGH. I THINK THEY HAVE A CULT AUDIENCE, A HALF-MILLION FANS IN A NATION OF 280 MILLION. I GUESS THAT’S BESIDE THE POINT--
That’s okay, that’s okay, the point is, the point is....
[LINE BREAKS UP.]

WHO’S THIS ‘STEEV MIK’ CHARACTER THAT'S LISTED ON THE ALBUM SLEEVE?
[quietly] Steev Mik was what I changed my name to for a little while. It was a very dark time. A real dark time. And I had to become someone else in order to be who I really was, and come back to it. Imagine if you had a balloon and you were so close to that balloon that all you really knew was rubbery red, had a string hanging around the bottom. You couldn’t really see much about it. You had to let the balloon go, up it flew in the air, finally you could look at it from a distance. ...Got it back, cuddled it... [inaud] Two years ago.

WHAT DO THE SONGS ON YOUR NEXT ALBUM SOUND LIKE?
I don’t even know how to answer that question. I think it’s a good question, but I don’t know how to answer it. I can say it like this: when I sit down to play music, there’s not a... The only way I can describe it is as ‘More.’ Like if you had ice cream. What do you do: NOT make ice cream? If you’re making ice cream, you don’t sit down and think I really should look into a juju bean venture. You wouldn’t do that. Juju beans get stuck to your teeth, they don’t even taste that good, they’re too sweet. You should make more ice cream. There’s no other option. If you were the president of Baskin Robbins, you don’t build a juju bean factory.

OK, BUT IS AN ANDREW W.K. BALLAD ON THE WAY?
It’s just going to be MORE. There’s no limits, no rules. I guarantee that it’s a rich rich rich place.

96 TRACK RECORDING?
At least. At least half of them I’d record 24 tracks and bounce those down to stereo to 2 tracks and then I’d start again. So some of them have well over 100 tracks. Of course all of this is completely unimportant if it’s no good. It was all whatever it took to sound well. It’s important for that to be known. The recording process took about two years and the mixing process took about two weeks.

...It’s a very wild world we live in , and I intend to see it as such at all times, even on the darkest days. Some hotel rooms come with blackout curtains, so that the room is just black at night. I don’t want that. That’s what I DON’T want.

DID YOU COME OUT OF A SCENE, OR WERE YOU MORE ON YOUR OWN AND HAPPENING TO COME IN AND OUT OF OTHER PLACES?
The latter is almost a perfect way to describe it. With the ‘whatever it takes’ mindset, by default I would end up playing shows with all different kinds of people, in all different kinds of scenarios.

HOW ON EARTH DID YOU GET SIGNED?
I don’t know. All I can say is I worked really hard on my first recordings and trying to get them to as many people as I could. I don’t think I really gave out that many copies, it’s just... The right thing at the right time. I don’t know... I don’t think about that too much. Questions like that. All I do is stay focused literally as I said before, on writing the most exciting songs I can and doing the best I can within that. Everything else either follows or doesn’t. So far, so good. I guess there’s no reason, it’s unacceptable for me to complain.

anyone see the interview of WK by Nardwuar? they're perfect for each other, and i love them both.

awww

Andrew WK did an instore on halloween a few years ago at a CD store I worked at. The minimum length of his "autograph" was a paragraph, and he often wrote quite a bit more. I had him sign a unicorn outfit I was going to wear that night, and he wrote some run-on sentence that began with "Zach, the second you stick this plush unicorn on your head is when the party begins..." and went on and on and on after that. He's a really nice guy.

Z S on Saturday, 10 March 2007 19:30 (4 hours ago)

that's awesome

I also had a chance to interview Andrew for Gear in 2002 ... he impressed me as being one of these guys who's wired like a mad scientist ... enraptured by his obsessions and oblivious to trivia -- two minutes after giving me this brilliantly bizarre dissertation about the value of fun, he professed to having no idea who Bill Gates is.

I still think I Get Wet is one of the decade's best records -- singularly focused, intensely crafted, endlessly odd, and simply just awesome.

it was immediately obvious that he had more going on than some people wanted to allow, and that he was going to try and do his "work" on multiple levels so that it could appeal to as many people in as many ways as possible

That sure worked out for him.

he sounds kind alike a stoic. i wonder if he has read marcus aurelius or epictetus.

i wonder if geir likes andrew wk. hes got killer melodies.

http://www.aquateencentral.com/epguide/images/screenshots/partyallthetime/full/partyallthetime65.jpg

Ha
"I love tourists. They're excited about everything, and I love excitement."

To me he seems allied in his philosophy to either tantric buddhism, Hassidic judaism, or both.

'I Get Wet', and his explanation of what it means ("In the ocean of life, you can stand on the shore or you can dive in. I choose to dive in and get wet" ), reminds me of the kind of Vajrayana buddhism promulgated by the likes of Chogyam Trungpa. Then again, it's entirely consistent with Hasidic teachings - life is for living, one should not shirk life or stand aloof - which is where Martin Buber comes in, perhaps. 'Party Till You Puke' - now there's anopther very tantric idea - that one is prepared to lick honey off the razor blade, as the traditional metaphor goes.