A primer for the uninitiated: Andrew W.K. (full name: Andrew Wilkes-Krier) is a 24 year old musician originally from Michigan. He recently released "The Wolf", his second full-length major label release for Island Records (following a series of EPs and underground releases) and the follow up to "I Get Wet", which was an instant classic in the Crawford household. Even if you don't put much effort into following current popular music, there's a good chance that you've heard Andrew W.K. at some point. Bucking a lot of "hip" thought about art not being intended for commerce, Andrew has licensed his songs to many different companies for use in commercials, video games, movies, and even a Kit Kat candy bar ad.

"With this music...there's nothing uncool about making a candy bar ad", Andrew explained during our recent interview. "That's AMAZING! That's exciting stuff! For me to deny excitement about getting to make a Kit Kat candy bar commercial? That was something I almost would've done for free! That kind of stuff is thrilling. Maybe some would call that naive, or say that I'm young or don't understand what real art is, but I think that kind of stuff is thrilling. It doesn't take anything away from me. I don't have any problem supporting a candy bar company, or giving them a song to use. It was my honor. But that's just me, and again, if someone thinks differently, I respect them, and hope they would give me the same respect."

Andrew plays nearly every note of music that you hear on his recordings (though he's assembled an incredible band to perform the songs live for the tours), and he is a classically trained pianist, something which figures much more prominently in the mix of "The Wolf". His songs are huge, loud and epic, yet simple, melodic and fun at the same time. Over the course of one of his records, you can hear echoes of everyone from Ministry to Abba, from Bruce Springsteen pianist Roy Bittan to Lee Ving of Fear. The music ranges from state-of-the-art pop punk played at a breakneck pace to soaring, harmonious ballads, and it all works together to further the central agenda of Andrew's music: The Party.

While plenty of musicians spend their time commiserating about their lot in life, and plenty of others spend their time boasting about their greatness, AWK has chosen instead to create music that celebrates the excitement of life as a whole, and encourages people to enjoy every last moment of it; hence, "The Party". His music is overwhelmingly, undeniably positive, but in his own typically humble fashion, he downplayed his role in the decision to create such positivity.

"It's interesting, because I don't say to myself "I gotta stay positive, I gotta stay positive..." or "I'm going to make really positive music", or "I'm just going to keep being a positive dude." I don't think of it in those kind of terms, really. I mean, maybe I could, but I more or less try to just look at things as they really are", Andrew said during our interview. "When I look at my life as it really is, I can't deny that it's good. And that's just the truth, you know what I mean? And it's not about a certain outlook or philosophy, necessarily, there's outlooks to incorporate, certainly, but the fact of the matter is, my life is good. I have food, my health is fine, all my limbs and extremities are working OK, my brain seems to be working just fine. I have good friends. I have good family. I was raised in a good environment. And, on top of that, I have one of the most amazing opportunities that anybody could ever ask for to work on every day. So that's the reality of my life, and to make music that denied that, or to live my life in a way that denied that would just be dishonest. I'm not really trying to represent myself or represent my life but, I just feel that I've gotta make the most of what I've got here, and I might as well try to spread it around as much as possible. So when I'm talking about these things in songs that might come off as being positive, or as having a positive outlook or a good philosophy or things like that, it's not so much what I think or my opinion, but just reminding us or pointing out the things that we've always known about what's right and what's good and what's true."

There's been plenty of discussion on this web site about heroes over the years, both of the fictional variety and the kind who live in our world. I'm of the mind that, as corny as it may sound upon first hearing of it, everyone could benefit from having heroes...people or characters who achieve greatness in the face of adversity and inspire everyone around them to have the courage to reach a little higher. After spending a good deal of time around him and his fans over the past year, I have decided that Andrew W.K. is one of my heroes.

There. I said it. Saying something like "the subject of my latest article is my hero" publicly is a pretty big risk for someone like me, admittedly. As someone who's been dipping my toes back into the field of "serious" music journalism of late, the last thing I should be doing is saying something that could be construed as tremendously and overtly "fannish" in print somewhere, according to just about every school of thought on journalism of any kind. Hell, even Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Lester Bangs told young William Miller not to make friends with the bands in "Almost Famous". Plus, I'm a 29 year old guy. Is it really healthy or socially acceptable to be spouting off about the virtues and heroism of a guy 5 years my junior, who's building a career with songs about "The Party"?

As a person of pretty deep convictions who strives to tell what I see as the truth whenever and wherever possible, I'd have to say the answer to the above question is a resounding "YES!" It is 100% true, and I believe that anyone would be justified in adopting him as one of their heroes or role models as well. He's pretty much everything I'd like to be as a person, but usually don't quite manage to reach. He's a good friend to the people he meets. He's humble. He's appreciative of everything life offers him, and encourages others to be the same way. He's got the most boundless reserve of energy of anyone I've ever gotten to know, and has an amazing work ethic to match it. He possesses an incredible amount of perspective for a guy of any age, never mind his. He's about as open-minded a person as I've ever met. I've never heard him really speak ill of anything or anyone. And perhaps most importantly: he's smart enough to see the risks inherent in trusting people and having faith in them, but remains courageous enough to do it anyway.

Even in dealing with his record label, so often a huge problem with recording artists, Andrew chose to buck convention and be trusting. In his own words: "The one thing that I really made an effort to let them know going in is that I was happy to be with them and trusted them and valued them, and that they were not the enemy. So many people were trying to tell me that I had to fight with my label all the time, and "don't let them get too close", and "don't give them too much control", but I kind of did the opposite. Maybe it's a bad idea. I don't know really why I went that way, but I just thought "No, I don't wanna fight with them. If I'm going to be friends with anyone, these are the guys I need. I need them to be on my side. I need them to believe in this." We went out of our way to include them, and why wouldn't we? They know more about this business than I ever will. I know how to make these songs, but I don't know how to do this other stuff. So thank goodness that we've been able to build this amazing thing with them, and I have nothing but good things to say about them. So far, so good."

A great deal of "the story" with Andrew is the fact that he takes leaps of faith like this all the time and again, encourages others to do so in every aspect of their lives. "I hope that, not just with this music, but that people will have the unending courage to always seek out things that will give them a real feeling that they can believe in, that isn't just like an "Oh yeah, sure, sure, I know it..." That whole know-it-all thing leaves you without any discovery, without any mystery, without any sense of wonder, without any real passion. When you know everything, what's there left to get excited about, you know what I mean? So I hope that people can take the risk. And if they're going to take the risk, I have to prove it to them. I have to show it to them, I have to earn their respect, earn their trust, in order to jump off that cliff with them. I want them to know that they're not taking the risk alone, but that we're all in it together."

Inclusion is also an integral part of Andrew's music and his life, perhaps even the key ingredient. He appears to take great care to refer to his work as "this music", rather than "his music". "I wanted to make something almost to live vicariously through other people who could come to it and feel completely included and valued and not left out, and hear themselves singing this song that loved them so much and wanted them so much. That it was their music and our music together, and I just wanted to be another guy in the midst of this celebration. That's kind of what this music is striving to do." He doesn't just write about "this celebration", as he put it...he lives it. He spends just as much time trying to get to know the people who love his music as they do him, if not more. He works tirelessly (as an extreme example, Andrew recently weathered a 24 hour marathon fan signing in Japan) and tours non-stop while trying to create something that's far more vast in scope than Andrew W.K. the person. For him, impact of "this music" is a far greater goal than merely being a rock star.

Of his new song "Never Let Down", he says "That song started out originally as a love song that I was writing when I was all alone. It was what I was hoping for, and imagining would be so great, like "Gosh, I'm so lonely, it would be so wonderful to have a situation like this", and I kind of created my perfect romantic love idea, and then I wrote a song about it, even though it was all in my imagination. Then the song kind of morphed into a real girlfriend that I had. And then, even after that, I was alone again, and I realized that I was feeling kinda down and kinda wimpy, generally just in a lonely mood. I was thinking to myself, "Gosh, I would give anything to be able to be in love again", just being kinda sorry for myself. Then I snapped out of it and felt like a fool, because almost like I'd just disgraced all the love that I had through this music, and that was kind of what the song ended up becoming about. "I get you, you get me, we get us." It's about people who love and believe in this music, and how, because of them, I'm pretty much guaranteed to never really be completely alone again, and how it's one of the greatest gifts a person can ever be given. I didn't make that on my own. People have taken it upon themselves to choose to be with this and have given me that beautiful thing, to feel needed and wanted, or just to feel part of something bigger than myself. That's always what I wanted more than anything...to make something that would make me just a small portion of a bigger thing."

As I mentioned to him during our interview, I do believe he's getting there. There's a bond being built here that's unlike just about any that I've seen in music. People who connect with the music of Andrew W.K. REALLY connect with it as a rule, and they tend to get personally involved with it in a really uncommon way. Over the time I've known of Andrew, and particularly during past few weeks while talking to him and some of his bigger fans at length, I've borne witness to this time and time again.

Andrew relates an experience he had after his first show in Vancouver: "This one guy who I've become...I'd say good friends with, just because he's so intense about his love for this music, he had spent two weeks painting this HUGE, photo-realistic banner. It said "I Play AWK Every Day". It had this painting of my face. It was really, really well done. It wasn't easy. It was done on canvas, and he said it took forever to do. I was so baffled...by the end of the night, I had been hanging out with them and all of their friends for a long time, and I was saying "I just don't know what to say. Why did you go through all of this trouble? Why did you do this?" He ended up writing a letter to me later. The letter was amazing, just an incredibly wonderful letter, it just completely blew my mind. He said very simply, "The reason we did all of that stuff was to make you happy." What do you say to something like that? That just made me feel like the luckiest person in the whole world. I get to do something already that I love so much, and then these guys loved it so much that they wanted to thank me?" It's so crazy. The possibility and potential for power to come from that kind of give and take is INSANE."

After I conducted the interview with Andrew, I actually ended up getting in touch with Nick, the fan from Andrew's story. Here's Nick's story about his first exposure to AWK-dom:

"I was lucky enough to have been exposed to Andrew's music relatively early. My friend Tavis had been a fan of Hanson Records (the Michigan based noise label) since the mid-1990's, and was a big fan of Andrew's noise music and WolfSlicer magazines (WolfSlicer was a 'zine Andrew worked on when he was younger...there's some information available on it in various places online, as well as some scans of issues.-Scott). One day Tavis came to my house in state of intense excitement. He dragged me down to his car, and sat me in the passenger seat. Then he turned and told me I'd better prepare myself to hear something that was going to change my life forever and for the better. He pushed a tape into the deck, and within seconds I knew that he was right.

What can I say? I was rooted to the spot by the music that came pouring out of those speakers. I literally could not believe what I was hearing. It was electrifying. It was absolutely immense, a gargantuan wave of molten ecstasy pulsing in my ears, setting my heart and brain aflame. It felt like everything in my life had been leading up to this moment. The music was like nothing I'd ever heard before, yet was at the same time somehow comforting and familiar. It was pouring into me and filling some void inside I hadn't even realised was there. It was like the missing jigsaw piece in my life. It was like "Oh man, THIS is what I've been waiting for!"

Each song was more magnificent than the last, soaring cathedrals of sound, a series of spiralling platinum towers, each more glorious and beautiful than the one preceeding it. Each song seemed to anticipate what I wanted, and satisfy that want before I even realised I wanted it! I was completely swept away by the sound, totally energised and excited beyond all reason by the pure unalloyed euphoria the music embodied and evoked. It was so exuberant and magical and revelatory an experience that I started to laugh in childlike joy.

When the last song finished, I just sat there stupefied. When I finally collected my thoughts, I turned to my friend and said "Okay, whoa, okay...dude!! You know when you really love a song, and you're listening to it with your friends, and they're talking, and you say to them "Dudes, be quiet, this part of the song is awesome!" Right? Well, you couldn't do that with these songs. They're entirely composed of the awesome part!!"

Then, as if I wasn't amazed enough by what I'd just experienced, Tavis said to me "And get this, this dude, Andrew W.K., is like, four years YOUNGER than us!! And he made this album BY HIMSELF!! And he put his HOME PHONE NUMBER on the back of the CD!!! And the title is "GIRLS OWN JUICE!!" And he painted this awesome BLEEDING SKULL with a BASEBALL CAP on the cover!!!

The subsequent release of the "Party Til You Puke" album only cemented my initial reaction, that this was unquestionably the music of the future. When I heard that Andrew had been signed to Island, I didn't have my usual knee-jerk reaction of "oh, he's sold out." Instead I thought, "Oh man, this is incredible, now everyone will have a chance to hear this music! This can only be good for the world!"

And three years later, my feelings remain the same. I loved this music the moment I set ears upon it, and if anything, I love it even more now. It has grown, deepened and strengthened, and it has become even more epic, triumphant and soul-stirringly magnificent than I'd have ever thought possible. Each new album comes closer to a perfect expression of the totality of human experience. There are moments in some of the songs where the order of the notes is so powerful that I feel like I'm teetering on the brink of some incredible epiphany, like the songs are near perfect mathematical equations which might allow us to communicate with whatever force created our universe. I fully realise how insane that sounds, but it's how I feel."

"Give and take", indeed.

Nick has been to 7 of Andrew's shows so far, and of one trip, he says "My friends and I drove across British Columbia in a van to watch AWK shows on three concurrent nights. The combined travel time over those three days was something like 24 hours. Needless to say, we utterly destroyed ourselves, developed the flu and were bedridden for a week."

Nick elaborates more about the music. "I've been trying to understand just what exactly Andrew's music means to me for the past two years, and I'm still not entirely sure. Maybe the most important thing it represents to me is potentiality. The possibility of transcending our individual weaknesses and limitations, and the potential we have as an entire species for evolution. Andrew's music is a kind of clarion call for truth, honesty, loyalty, love and commitment. After years of erecting mental walls and increasingly limited and suffocating notions of what I thought art should or shouldn't be, Andrew's music was the wedge that forced my mind and my tastes back open again. Instead of allowing cynicism, fear, self-consciousness, and humourless self-righteousness to dictate the art I consume, the music encouraged and demanded that I re-embrace the world, and try to accept everything it has to offer.

The music has an incredible liberatory power, and when played live it opens these pockets of total freedom where people who have nothing at all in common can come together to share pleasure and celebrate being alive. For an hour it's possible to completely forget who you are, and lose yourself in the music and the mass. You are given the ultimate freedom, freedom from the self, and freedom from self-consciousness. There may be no greater freedom than the freedom to laugh at yourself, the freedom to look and act totally stupid. Andrew's music makes me proud to be a human being, and makes me want to be a better one."

(From left to right: Holly, Becky, and Elaine with Andrew W.K. after the 9/11/03 Philadelphia show. Photo courtesy of Don't Stop The Noise)

Another diehard fan I spoke to, Elaine, has been to 11 of Andrew's shows in the year and a half since she first heard of him through the video for the anthem "Party Hard". Of the shows, she says "it means seeing old friends again, even if it's a day in between or months, and their memories, especially Mr. W.K.'s are unbelievable! I look forward to seeing Andrew very much. He is an amazing person, and one of the nicest people you will ever meet. The members of his band and crew are all wonderful, too! I always leave his shows feeling good!" Elaine also speaks highly and strongly of the positivity in Andrew's music. "He's like a therapist set to music, and so full of positive energy! I put on "Got To Do It" when things may not be going well or I feel bad, and it lifts me up. On "The Wolf", "Never Let Down" does the same. In my eyes, he is the best thing to happen to music since The Ramones, and from me, that's quite a compliment!"

I think that the Ramones comparison Elaine (a pretty huge Ramones fan by all accounts) makes is quite valid, particularly within the context of Andrew's live show. In fact, the first time I saw an AWK show, immediately after it finished, I told my friend that it was "the best Ramones show I'd seen since Dee Dee was in the band". If you were lucky enough to see The Ramones while they were still around, you know that while their shows were crazy, there was a real happy, positive vibe to them at the same time, just like there is at Andrew's shows. At the end of the show Andrew and his band played recently at New York's Irving Plaza, Andrew invited about 50 audience members onstage with him during the last few songs to dance, get crazy, and sing along with the band. This is actually a pretty common practice at his shows nowadays. When I see things like this, I can't help but think that Joey and Dee Dee are looking down from wherever they are, laughing, and thinking "That kid's nuts! I like 'em!"

One of the other fans I've spoken to a great deal recently is Holly, who runs the excellent Andrew W.K. fan web site "Don't Stop The Noise" (named after an early AWK song, recently re-recorded for "The Wolf" as "The Song"...). Of Andrew's music, she says "I loved it from the first note I heard. I knew immediately that this was music I wanted to hear as much as possible. I still have yet to hear a song of his that I don't love." Holly's in the process of organizing WK Con, an Andrew W.K. fan convention scheduled to happen in eastern Pennsylvania sometime in November, 2003. She's also got an AWK tribute CD in the works as well. If you're interested in attending WK Con, or in the tribute CD, there's plenty of information available at her site. I ask Holly how much Andrew's music means to her, given the amount of work she does to promote it on a fan level, and she responds "A lot. It's hard to even say... but I spend a lot of time trying to express how much it means to me every day, with my fan site, projects like the Tribute CD, and just generally trying to share the music. It really is an every day thing, a natural thing, and even though it's still only been less than two years since I discovered it, I can't imagine my life without it."

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Becky D, who put me in touch with all of these great folks from Andrew's fan community. Becky's been to 10 Andrew W.K. shows so far, travelling all the way from Pennsylvania to Michigan for one of them! ""When I found out about Andrew", Becky recalls, "it was like a breath of fresh air, learning that a person like him DID exist, someone with his morals and character." Of his band, she says "I admire how they work hard at what they do, and are very supportive of one another. They've all got a great rapport with one another, and they work very well together creatively. It's as if they were all brought together by musical destiny, and were also brought here to help bring OTHERS together."

Appropriately to how I first came in contact with her, Becky closes by saying "Their music has made me feel that this is all one AMAZING continuous adventure!" I met Becky after one of Andrew's shows about a year ago, and it was a night that drove home the point of just how extraordinary the Andrew W.K. experience really is. Andrew and the band finished the show around 11:30, and they came out to the parking lot of Old Bridge, NJ's Birch Hill Night Club (soon to be demolished, sadly) at around Midnight to sign some things for fans. Immediately upon their arrival, a party started. The atmosphere in that parking lot became electric. People got beers out of their car and were sharing them with each other. Iron Maiden records started blaring out of Camaros. Bassist Gregg Roberts led a booming chorus of the faithful in a chant of "BUSCH...BARBARIANS!!!! WHOAAAAAAAAA!!!" (I wasn't there for the genesis of this chant, so I still have no idea what he or any of them meant by it. Regardless, it was really funny.) One person pulled out a didgeridoo and started playing it. There was even a girl there who ended up climbing to the top of a 50 foot tree, in a feat of (apparently) drunken bravery. People waited for HOURS as Andrew chatted, signed things, and spent time with every person who waited for him. Amazingly, I didn't see a single one of them look the least bit impatient. Everyone there had a blast, and when I left the parking lot at 4 AM, people were STILL hanging out having a blast. It was truly one of the best parties I'd ever attended in my life, and the whole thing happened simply because Andrew and his band showed up and became a few more guys in the midst of the celebration.

Copyright © 2003 Scott Crawford