Andrew W.K. Is About Energy

07/06/09 1:38pm

by Ian Gormely (CHARTattack)

Some folks at CHARTattack used to think Andrew W.K. was stupid — a ridiculous oaf with a ridiculous gimmick.

Not anymore. Dude's completely genuine. And we've got tremendous respect for that.

Dude's also got a bazillion things going on and talks about them non-stop.

Here, then, is a sample of what he had to say to us:

CHARTattack: You have a new split seven-inch called "A Wild Pear" coming out with Nardwuar's band, The Evaporators. How did this come about?
Andrew W.K.: I've been a hardcore fan of Nardwuar's ever since I first saw his interviews over 10 years ago.

A friend of mine gave me a VHS tape of a bunch of different interviews of his — really early ones, some of the first ones he ever did — and I was just really struck by it. I don't know exactly what hit me, or why. But his energy, his enthusiasm, his skill as a performer, as an interviewer, as a researcher, and his uniqueness most of all. He was completely and entirely himself. No one else was like him and no one else could be like him and I can't imagine him being any other way.

So all of that was just built up until I finally got to meet him and be interviewed by him myself. I had never had an experience like that because I had never been starstruck by an interviewer before. I was really worked up to meet him, just to get my chance to do a Nardwuar interview.

And since then I've got to do another one, we became friends and I just always told him how much I liked what he did and it made it easy for us to get along. And when he came to me with this seven-inch idea and it was really a natural choice to do it. Not only because it's an exciting thing to do — I've never done a split seven-inch and I get to cover these great Canadian tunes that I love — but also because it acknowledges and pays respect to this dream coming true.

When you love something in the world, you have that certain kind of energy about it, eventually it's gonna manifest itself somehow. "What you plant, you're gonna sow."

When I worked with Lee "Scratch" Perry, we got to make an album together, I made an album with him. He said that a lot. He said it in his lyrics, he talked about it a lot, he just kept saying, "What you sow is what you're going to reap" and he talked about things manifesting. I had been aware of these ideas before, but I could really see what he was talking about when he put it the way he did.

Is that what you enjoy about working with other musicians, getting that alternative perspective?
Absolutely. And I never was able to appreciate it so literally until the last few years I worked with a lot of people and made lots of music with different people when I was in high school and middle school.

Then, when I moved to New York and started doing Andrew W.K. full-on, I swore off collaborating or being associated with anybody if I could help it.

Once I established that I existed somewhat, I realized that it would be a lot of fun to contradict that and start working with people again. But I never anticipated how powerful it would be. I can really appreciate it now. Being around [other music and musicians] just gives me energy to take back to my own music.

What led to this decision to start contradicting yourself?
In 2005, I made a lot of decisions to do things differently than I had been doing them, just to make things challenging and new and scary again. Sometimes doing the opposite of what you've done is really exciting.

This friend of mine is the leader of the musical group To Live And Shave In L.A., and I really wanted to play with this group so I called him and he said I could and that sort of started the ball rolling.

Was the desire to contradict yourself what led you to hosting on your new Cartoon Network show Destroy, Build, Destroy?
I've always loved TV since I first got to do anything with it. The environment, the atmosphere is just really thrilling to me. Again, around 2005, one of the decisions I made with my manager was to really focus on doing a TV show and working towards that. When it came to Adult Swim, I was able to meet the programming director there and he was promoted up to also work with Cartoon Network and that's when this show opportunity came around.

Did you come up with the show's premise? [Kids creatively destroy something like a car, rebuild the parts into something new and then creatively destroy that.]
No, I didn't. I had been developing show ideas with Adult Swim and Cartoon Network, just trying to figure out what we could do. When this show came around it seemed like the perfect thing. It involved all the things I wanted to do, hosting, a high energy atmosphere... it involved something I'd never even seen before which is kids and 500 foot explosions in a competition show. So it just seemed perfect.

I don't think of one thing supporting the other. It's not like the TV is to get the music out there and the music is to get the TV. It's all to get this energy out there. There's many ways to do it. I used to think that music was the only way. But it turns out music is just an extremely good way. There's a lot of other really good ways, too. Really powerful ways to create this feeling of possibility, to remind people that they're free.

You also have a solo piano record coming out as well.
Yes, in the first week of September. It's called '55 Cadillac. It's solo piano, instrumental, improvisations that I made up as I went along and then I took the best of that and put it on this record. To go back to the same idea, it's the exact opposite of how I recorded my other albums. The records I made before each took two years to make. This took two hours.

And you've also founded the new record label, Skyscraper Music Maker.
There's three artists on the label... well, four if you include me. The first is Aleister X, the second is Bad Brilliance and the third is Cherie Lily. I've been working with them.

I had dreams of music that I wanted to make and I was so conflicted because it wasn't Andrew W.K. music. And I didn't know how to feel about that. I wanted to make these different kinds of songs and make this different kind of music, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. Then it came from other people. Me getting to contribute to what they're doing is just the best. It's my favourite music in the world and I get to work on it.

This is just a huge exciting new way for me to be able to get new music out faster and to a lot more people than I've ever been able to do before.