AWK: Hungry like The Wolf

If you think that rocker Andrew W.K.’s energy stops when he gets offstage, think again. In a… If you think that rocker Andrew W.K.’s energy stops when he gets offstage, think again. In a conference-call phone interview, every sentence he spoke was quick and urgent, though not due to lack of time. He is the rock journalist’s dream interview: rather than the dreaded one-word answers, W.K. will spout off paragraphs of information, sometimes digressing from the original question asked – but the information he shares is so insightful, there is no room for complaints.

Perhaps he’s best known for “partying hard” or “until you puke,” as seemed to be the theme of his debut album, I Get Wet. It appears as though his ’80s-influenced power ballads aren’t known from radio airplay or from TRL spots on MTV. Rather, his songs have provided quite a soundtrack for commercials in the recent months: “It’s Time to Party” was featured on an advertisement for Expedia.com, he put a new spin on the Kit Kat jingle, “Gimme a Break,” not to mention providing music for Target and Coors Light ads. And MTV can’t seem to produce one of its signature reality shows without using one of W.K’s songs in the soundtrack.

W.K., whose signature look consists of extremely faded, acid-washed jeans, a dirty white T-shirt and white tennis shoes, released his sophomore album, The Wolf, at the beginning of September, and its tone is a bit different than the partying vibe of I Get Wet. Never fear, he hasn’t “grown up” and written songs with a more mature feel since Wet.

“A lot of these new songs were actually written before or during the time of recording I Get Wet,” said W.K. “A lot of the parts, a lot of the lyrics, a lot of the melodies – the music itself – has been around just as long, if not longer. I just didn’t feel that I had earned – that I had proved myself to this music yet. It’s not about proving myself to the world, it’s more about [the fact that] I hadn’t shown this music yet, what exactly I was able to do.”

What the album does have, however, is a huge, powerful sound. According to W.K., it was a more organized recording process that allowed the album’s multitude of recording tracks to stack up “really nicely.”

“There are more tracks on this album, quite a bit. I think the most that we had on any song to mix with was 110. And then the average was between 90 to 100. It depends on how you look at it, because a lot of the tracks were vouched down, meaning there are too many tracks to mix with and we had to put things into groups,” W.K. explained. “So there might be 80 or 100 tracks of vocals to make up the vocal sound, but they’re not all on their own track – they’re grouped into a big set of tracks. Otherwise, we would have had, like, 400 tracks, and that would have been insane.”

The Wolf was creating a buzz months before its release date, as rumors circulated about different titles for it, the most controversial being Blow Your Bone.

“I could have called it [Blow Your Bone] if I wanted to; I chose not to. Things were taken a little out of context in terms of that album title. I guess it was being promoted by a certain place on the Internet as it being the album title. Which is fine, but it was never the album title. It was one of about 10 titles at that point,” said W.K.

“I had never chosen one way or another until, literally, like a few hours before the actual deadline on the album. I had about 200 album titles on my list,” he continued.

W.K. hasn’t played a show in Pittsburgh since last November, but if you were lucky enough to catch one of the select dates he played on 2003’s Vans Warped Tour, chances are you didn’t hear much of what is on The Wolf. W.K. likes his fans to be as energetic as he is at his shows, and wants them singing along with him. If fans don’t know the words to the songs, that can’t happen.

Now that The Wolf has been out for a couple of months, fans should definitely hear some cuts from it this weekend.

Andrew W.K., Hoobastank and Die Trying will play at Club Laga in Oakland on Sat., Nov. 15, at 8 p.m. Tickets for the all-ages show are $17. For more information, call (412) 682-2050.