Born in California, he was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of Michigan. When he started taking piano lessons at 5 years old, graduate students from the school taught him as part of their program. It was a tremendous learning experience for him and instilled his love of music.
His sound is basically death-metal with pop melodies. He feels that he shouldn't limit his taste in music and writes what he feels.
His real name is Andrew Wilkes-Krier. The name Andrew W.K. came from elementary school when his teacher needed to differentiate him from another Andrew in the class.
His first EPs were released in 2000 on Bulb Records, home to such wonderfully obscure artists as Quintron, Ass Baboons of Venus and 25 Suaves. They got the attention of Island Records, which released his debut album, I Get Wet, in 2001.
As a teen he was a drummer in some death-metal groups. He later became a a one-man show, taking the stage with a CD player, keyboard, and microphone. He played a couple of opening slots for Foo Fighters in the early 2000s.
When he finally formed a band, it was with three guitars, a bass and a drummer. One of the guitarists is Jimmy Coup, who played with thrash band Coup de Grace. The drummer, Donald "D.T." Tardy, was in the death-metal group Obituary.
When he released his debut album in 2001 there was a very mixed reaction from critics. The popular British music magazine NME put him on the cover with the headline "The Saviour of Music"; the American website Pitchfork called it "tard-rock," adding, "This here is about as empty as rock music gets, right down to the tinny, digitally processed tonebank noise that passes for 'guitars.'"
When he signed with Island Records in 2001, they put together what he called a "concept" for him, fleshing out the image he had been developing as a hard-charging rocker. "It was like I was being carried along by something out of my control," he told the British magazine NME. "My life was being turned upside down, but it felt like being at the top of a rollercoaster: incredible."
Starting with his first major-label single, "
Party Hard," he made "party" his brand and has maintained that throughout his career, with songs like "Party Til You Puke," "Big Party" and "It's Time To Party" following. Instead of shedding that image when he got older, he evolved and expanded it, explaining at every opportunity that the "party" is a gateway to higher consciousness, a way for us to live the full human experience.
He hosted the show
Destroy Build Destroy, which ran from 2009-2011 on Cartoon Network, even though it wasn't a cartoon. On the show, groups of kids would destroy stuff and then build things from the wreckage. He's had other hosting gigs as well, including a show called
Undateable and another called
TakePart Live.
He moved to New York City in 1998 when he was 18, not to make music but to enter the world of fashion. He got a job with the esteemed designer Rei Kawakubo but was fired after about two months. He stayed in the city by working various odd jobs while working on music.
Legal issues kept him from releasing new music for a long time; between 2007 and 2017 the only album he released was
55 Cadillac in 2009, which is all piano improvisations. When asked why he hadn't put out music during this time, Andrew would say he partied too hard, but a
nasty legal dispute with someone he describes as "someone I worked very closely with and had a formal and family business relationship with" was also a factor.
From 2014 to 2016 he had a weekly advice column in
The Village Voice called
"Ask Andrew W.K." where he would answer questions from readers like "Does heaven exist?" and "Should I feel bad about my past?" His answers were always supportive and carefully considered.
He married the actress Kat Dennings (of 2 Broke Girls and The 40-Year-Old Virgin) in 2023. They kept their coupling on the down-low until 2021, when they announced their engagement. Dennings became the step-mother to Andrew's two kids from a previous marriage.
He's almost always seen in public wearing a white T-shirt and white pants, his signature look. He says he chose white because "it shows up well through the darkness."
He started doing lectures after being asked to speak at New York University in 2006. That lecture lasted four hours and proved very popular, so he did more like it, usually with plenty of time for Q&A. In 2016 he embarked on a nationwide speaking tour called The Power Of Partying.
