A short essay by Andrew W.K.
I was pretty confused when I couldn’t get a single crazy, embarrassing, or fucked-up gig out of W.K. He kept insisting that he couldn’t remember any, and I didn’t realize until later that he can be notoriously cryptic in interviews. Regardless, here’s a chapter about always striving to be a better performer, with W.K. in full motivational mode.
As a performer, almost every show seems like the worst for me. Conversely, almost every show feels like the best in a strange way. An unfortunate aspect of my experience as a performer is that it’s very rare, in a beautiful way, to feel that a show went perfect. I never complete an experience on stage and feel that there’s nothing that I could have done better. Learning to accept that feeling is a big rite of passage, as you have to learn and accept that perfection is not what performance is about. It’s not about me feeling like I had a perfect show. Sometimes the shows I think are the worst from my perspective will be the best for someone in the band or for an audience member.
If I ask what made it so special for them, usually it was something that was completely out of my control. That’s what makes performing such a mysterious and elusive craft. There’s only so much ability I have, for better or worse, to control what goes on once I hit the stage. My mindset now is that I’m not allowed to have a bad show. A truly consummate, professional performer—and I don’t know if I’ll ever get there in this lifetime—has no bad shows. A great performer, and a real mature performer of any age, only has great or amazing shows. There should never be that feeling that anything they have done could have been improved in any way, and that’s a great show. An amazing show is when everything goes wrong, and they still put on a great show.
That’s something I aspire to, which is to never crack and to never give in to emotions like frustration. The performer should never let themselves stand in the way of the show. My feeling, nine times out of ten, is pure sadness after a show. It’s not sadness as a rational emotion but sadness as a physical emotion. The feeling has all the trappings, surroundings, and textures of sadness, without that core interior truth that would justify true sadness. I feel sad for no reason after most of the shows, and I’m trying to accept that feeling as a physical reaction, which is the recovery of endocrine and serotonin levels balancing back out.
On this current tour, there have been a few shows where I felt amazing afterward. That was so rare in the past. I finally felt like I couldn’t have done any better and didn’t have that sadness. On the other hand, those are shows that fans could have felt were the worst. It’s baffling, in a very humbling way. There are also people who just don’t understand what I’m trying to do. I encounter that at festivals, when people just pass by and stop to check us out. The music is what empowers me with that energy, that aggressive, “party-starting” mentality. I’ve played shows early on, for four or five people who definitely didn’t like what I was doing, probably for good reason. But, there’s maybe one person that did like it, and that would lead to another opportunity.
Most people truly do not like what I do. At this point, anyone that shows up after this many years, there’s an understanding that they really want to be there. They do connect with it, and that’s hugely meaningful to me. I feel like it’s a special team of people who found each other, or found this feeling, that we’re all interested in and able to conjure up together. That feeling has become more precious to me. It’s so easy to become disconnected these days. Those pinpoints of connection, those bright yet very fragile lights of understanding, go a long way.