A Conversation with Mike Andrews – HuffPost 10.25.12

Mike Ragogna: How are you, Mike?

Mike Andrews: I’m good, how are you doing?

MR: I’m pretty well, thanks. So you have this new solo album, Spilling A Rainbow. Can you tell us about it?

MA: Yeah, you know, it’s another record I’ve made. Add it to the list of other records I’ve made in my lifetime. This one is sort of inspired by the birth of my son and the sort of sprouting of a family. That’s kind of where it starts.

MR: I think we need a little history lesson so we can appreciate further this album. You had a certain association with a certain movie called Donnie Darko?

MA: Yeah, that was one of my earlier accomplishments; I did the score for Donnie Darko and recorded and produced “Mad World” for that movie.

MR: And you played piano for that as well.

MA: Yeah, I played everything on that score. That was the score I did by myself, so yeah.

MR: Mike, you’ve been the darling of Sundance, can you refresh us on some of your movies? For instance, you had Zero Effect, we mentioned Donnie Darko, and you’ve done television work on a couple of my favorite shows, here, Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared.

MA: Yeah, I did part of Undeclared and then I jumped off to do Orange County with Jake Kasdan who I’ve continued to work with through all his projects.

MR: You also worked on She’s Out Of My League.

MA: I mostly do movie stuff every day and, occasionally, I get time to stop and make a more personal record, which is what Spilling A Rainbow is.

MR: So there’s your latest album and Hand On String from 2005, your other solo album. What’s your creative process when it’s writing for yourself as a recording and performance artist versus writing a score?

MA: You know, it’s not really that different. Obviously, there are no vocals on my score work so that takes that out of the equation. I make music everyday, so when I’m working on my records, I just start with nothing and try to come up with some ideas and draw from my inspiration, different music that I love and experiences that I’ve had. It’s more of the revision process that’s what’s different about the process with the film and television and my score work. Of course, working on a movie is more of a collaboration with a director and different people that are outside of my own experience. My own records aren’t necessarily as collaborative as my movies.

MR: And I’m imagining because of how you’re approaching scores and the instrumentation, et cetera, that your solo albums benefit from that because your mind goes beyond a formatted “Verse, chorus, verse, chorus.”

MA: Yeah, I mean, score work is much more linear writing than that sort of song structure you’re talking about so it does open up my mind to approaching songwriting in a different way structurally.

MR: I would say as far as the instrumentation, that also reflects the freedom you’ve experienced as a movie music composer.

MA: Yeah, well I mean there’s no rules, it’s just music. Throughout history there’s been a lot of different ways to approach it and I’m just trying to find the one that suits me. With the score thing I have to travel through a lot of different soundscapes so things that I pick up along the way that I identify with and feel affinity to, I bring those into my songwriting.

MR: And I’m imagining that it also affects some of the topics. You start the album off with a song called “The Dentist.”

MA: I was getting my teeth worked on and I just got shot up with Novocain. To accelerate the process of Novocain entering your body and numbing you, as sort of like a catalyst they throw some — I don’t know what it is but it’s sort of — an upper, an amphetamine kind of thing they give you. So it got my heart pumping and right about that time, I was thinking about how I was about to have a child, which is sort of a new concept to me and I just had this drastic panic attack slash realization and then I just sort of grabbed a pad of paper and wrote that song down and then I went home and recorded it and that was sort of the beginning of my record.

MR: The thought of going to the dentist is always scary.

MA: Yeah, it is. It’s not a pleasant place to go. It’s not a place you go to relax, I don’t think.

MR: [laughs] It’s not your vacation spot. But there are vacation spots in “My Warming World.” From your lyrics, the song could be interpreted a couple of different ways. What was going on in that song?

MA: Well, you know, lyrically, it’s not really the negative connotation of warming world that you might think. It’s more of just sort of the warming of my world with my partner, my wife and how she sort of brought warmth into my life. It’s a positive thing.

MR: Right, it’s not about global warming.

MA: Yeah, that’s it. Just sort of when you meet someone that you want to spend your life with, it changes your perspective on who you are and what you want. So that’s kind of what it was. It’s just a love song to my wife, really.

MR: Your warming world, your growing family. Has it affected the way you’re creating music?

MA: You know, not really. It’s hard being a musician, you know, and being in a relationship. I made the decision a while back to focus primarily on film scores, so it took me off the road. My solo records and my private projects are not my primary thing. A lot of people have to spend so much time on the road. When I decided to not be on the road so much and spend time trying to have a somewhat normal life, I found my wife, and we got married and had a child. She knew what she was getting into. [laughs] My life hasn’t changed that much as far as music. I make music every day, I work out of my own studio that’s here that I built here at my house. My life hasn’t changed that much. Obviously, everything’s changed but my process of making music is something that I do every day. It’s sort of like my life when I’m not making music has changed enormously.

MR: When you have a child, it totally changes a lot of paradigms in one’s life. It did have an effect, obviously, on your album. Do you see an evolution in your work?

MA: Yeah. Obviously, when you have a child and you’re witnessing that person experience things for the first time over and over again, there is a sort of reduction that happens where you’re experiencing all these things again for yourself and after like almost half a lifetime of experience going back to such simple concepts and simple epiphany-type realizations. When your child is walking around and sees a bee close up for the first time or something, these are all things that you really take for granted. So obviously, when you love your child so much and you’re focusing so much on him, you sort of get inside their body when they have these giant experiences. You’re so much a part of your children and they’re so much a part of you that there is a shift in your perception big time. Many of those songs are just me in his body having that experience that he had and then coming back into my own mind and body and interpreting those experiences. That’s sort of what a lot of the songs are.

MR: Beautifully said. The song “Spilling A Rainbow” is an example of one of those kinds of songs, right?

MA: Yeah, well that song, particularly, was a song, which is so strange. I had a dream where he came to me. While he was in the womb, I had a dream where this child comes to me and just sort of takes it from there and tells me what potentially might happen when he arrives. It’s really my wife spilling the rainbow is what’s happening. She has this person that comes out of her that changes our lives.

MR: One of the tracks, “Waiting For You To Wake,” seems to tie-in to “Spilling A Rainbow.” Can you go into that song?

MA: Well, our child didn’t sleep through the night until his first year. That was just really me on daddy detail basically in the middle of the night and I woke up before light, four o’clock in the morning and was just sitting there waiting for him to wake up. We have this little video monitor that we can watch so I was just sitting there watching him on the video monitor making sure that he was okay, still breathing and everything. I sat and wrote a song about just sitting there. I decided to take some time off of work at the beginning of his birth, which is why this record also happened. Otherwise, I would’ve been working all the time on my film scores.

MR: I’m sure you were nudged during that period, with, “Oh, can you just fit in this… ” fill in the blank.

MA: The first thing I did was Funny People. Judd [Apatow] was like, “I know you just had a child, but I think this is going to be a really easy gig.” Well there’s no easy film score. That was my first job back after Oliver was born.

MR: What advice might you have for new artists?

MA: You know, make music you love and that way if anybody ends up liking your music, they like the same music that you do. It seems like a simple concept. But for me, that’s really been the key to continuing playing music. Make stuff you like and be open to situations where you don’t think you might fit in.

MR: I think that’s such a subtle point. I think sometimes when people are making music, they’re not making music that they like. They’re being pragmatic.

MA: Yeah. It’s hard. As a musician, you want to do something that you think is going to be successful. Obviously, anything you do, if you’re going to put your whole day into it or whatever, you want it to give you something back. Sometimes that gets clouded with the motivation. The ambition clouds the art. I think you’ve just got to remember that music is a spiritual art form… to me, anyway. Even in its most commercial sense, when I’m doing a film score, it’s still coming from my heart. It’s not coming from science, or whatever. It’s not coming from what I think someone might like, it’s what I like.

MR: Yeah. “Ambition clouds the art.” When you get the bug for doing a solo project, and if you have the kind of success that you view as “success” for this project, is that going to put you more on the path of being more of a solo artist?

MA: Not really. I like my life. I really enjoy making film scores, and more than anything I just enjoy making music and making new music. It’s hard. I feel good about the pace that I’m at as far as my output of music. Sometimes being artist is about repetition and I’m not a huge repeater. It’s about making an identifiable musical logo for yourself. I like to change, I like to shapeshift and like we talked about when I first got on the phone, my name has changed, what people see as my style of music has changed and fluctuated with my life. Successful artists usually are people that do the same thing over and over again which is fine for them, but for me, I’m more of a change person, you know what I mean?

MR: Yeah. I have to ask you about “Mad World,” the Tears For Fears song that you re-recorded with Gary Jules. That was an international number one record. It made a little bit of noise here, people know it, but it was a number one record around the world. To me, the moodiness of that record was exactly right on, stripping away all the Tears For Fears production, and it seems like that was the exact read that song always was meant to have. Is that how you felt when you finished producing it and were listening to the playback?

MA: You know what, it was coming off my score so the whole score pretty much sounds like that. I was sort of just in a minimalist state of mind at that point. I heard it, I thought it was special, but I didn’t think it was a hit song. It was hard to even think in terms of that. If I was to compare it to something that was on the radio or something that was a hit at that point, I think “hit” wouldn’t have been the first thing that came to mind. I always try to make stuff that affects me and I think that if given the chance, a lot of music that doesn’t seem like the formula of what might be a hit would be more popular. There’s a lot of great music that doesn’t sound like whatever. Everything sounds very dance-y now.

MR: We go through phases. I don’t want to classify “Mad World” as “emo,” but on the other hand, I guess it does fit into that category a little.

MA: Right. The lyrics already were, and then my approach to it was probably. It’s like reverse melodrama. You strip everything away and then it becomes more dramatic as opposed to how some people add things to make them more dramatic and I guess I went the other direction.

MR: And you were rewarded with a monster hit around the world. That must have been not only surprising but satisfying.

MA: It was. I made it with my friend who I’d been friends with since my childhood, so there was sort of a sweet success to it. But you know, again, it wasn’t our song. The pursuit of confusion. Everybody’s confused by the whole thing. “Did you write that song? Wait, you didn’t sing that song. What did you do on that song?” It’s funny. It’s funny to have people try to figure out what I did.

MR: And, of course, you did play piano on the track. We have to remind everybody of that, too.

MA: Yeah, I mean, but it’s funny. It’s more than that… people still wonder what I did, but it’s good. I’d rather have people know the song than know me, to be honest with you.

MR: That’s nicely modest of you. Last song to talk about from Spilling A Rainbow… “Bubbles In Space”

MA: That’s a very, very cool video that you guys also showed on Huffington Post and helped us show it to, gosh, a ton of people.

MR: Yes, I do remember that it perhaps came in through my blog. Ahem. [laughs] I appreciate that. Can you go into the song?

MA: Yeah. “Bubbles In Space,” that was just me watching my son blowing bubbles in the back yard and sort of using that as a sort of metaphor about letting your breath out like letting go of your past. That’s a simple thought.

MR: Mike, thanks for talking to me.

MA: Okay, thank you for having me, Mike.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne