Chances are that in your endless searching through YouTube videos you have come across acoustic guitarist Andy McKee. He has quickly become the most-watched artist on YouTube, known for his original, intricate finger-style pieces. He played at the Paradise Lounge on Monday, Feb. 11 with fellow acoustic guitarists Antoine Dufour and Craig D'Andrea after stopping in to play some live music on-air in the WMFO radio station. Between songs, McKee chatted about his beginnings as a Metallica fan, guitar competitions in Kansas and his Internet fame.
Question: Can you tell us about one of the songs you're playing?
Andy McKee: One's a song on my "Art of Motion" (2005) album, and it's kind of inspired by a book that I liked to read when I was younger that talked about the future and how we'd have robots in our house[s] doing the dishes and [we would have] flying cars. And this book was written in 1960 or something. It said by the year 2000 we'd have all these cool things but it never came to be. But I always thought it would be cool to have a flying car so I wrote a song about it. It's called "Keys to the Hovercar."
Q: How long have you been playing guitar?
AM: I actually got my first guitar when I was 13, and now I'm almost 29 ... so almost 16 years I've been playing. I started out with the electric guitar primarily and was into Metallica and Pantera and Dream Theater ... really hard core kind of rock. When I was about 16, I heard an acoustic guitar player called Preston Reed, and he just blew my mind. He was playing instrumental acoustic guitar music, just solo, and was covering rhythm and melody and harmony all at once. I was really just amazed by it and got into acoustic guitar a lot then and found out about Michael Hedges and Don Ross and Billy McLaughlin. Those [three with Reed] were my biggest inspirations on acoustic guitar.
Q: Did you have any formal training guitar or did you pick it up yourself?
AM: I pretty much learned on my own. When my dad got me my guitar on my thirteenth birthday he got me a handful of lessons, and I took about a year of electric guitar lessons. Usually we would work on songs that I wanted to learn ... I would bring in a CD, like a Metallica CD ... and my guitar teacher would show me how to do it. But after that I was pretty much on my own, and for whatever reason, I always had a pretty good ear. I would spend a lot of time in my room, listening to CDs ... I would play a couple seconds of it and then say "Ok, so where is this on the guitar?" and then start to put it together. I never went to university ... actually dropped out of high school when I was 16 and started playing guitar all the time.
Q: You mentioned someone who influenced you, but what made you make the switch from electric guitar to acoustic?
AM: It was really just seeing Preston Reed play. My first guitar was an acoustic one, but I was trying to learn hard rock on an acoustic guitar. I just was fascinated with it. I just really loved the sound of it and the fact that you're playing with your fingers ... you can do so much more with it ... whereas with a pick you can only do one [note]. It makes it possible to have individual baselines and melodies and chords all at once.
Q: How long does it take you to compose [one of your songs]?
AM: It varies sometimes ... usually it takes me a couple of months. I'll come up with some ideas and then hit a block maybe, pick it up later on, come up with another idea ... it's usually like that ... usually it'll come in different times. Occasionally it's all in one day you've got a tune, but that's pretty rare for me. [Most of the time] you have to keep coming back to it, bringing fresh ideas.
Q: You've been heralded as one of the youngest guys who plays finger-style music very well, and you've been awarded several times ... how do you feel about that?
AM: It's pretty cool. It's kind of funny too. Honestly, music as a competition is kind of weird ... that doesn't really make much sense ... music isn't a sport. For me, anyway, the reason why I did some of these contests is that being from Topeka, Kansas, there's not really much going on there musically. It's not like Nashville or Austin or Boston or anything. I was trying to think of ways I could help to establish myself in the music community or particularly the acoustic guitar community. Strangely enough the International Finger-Style Guitar Championships are held in Kansas, in this really small town which has a population of probably 5,000 people or something. But they have this bluegrass festival there ... thousands and thousands of people from all over the world come to this thing, and in about 1975 they decided to start the finger-style guitar championships. In 2000 I decided maybe I'd try the contest. It was just a way to start making a name for myself.
Q: So all the YouTube coverage has really seemed to help your career so far.
AM: Absolutely. The contests I did helped a bit at first, and I actually toured a bit in Taiwan, Japan and Belgium, but still I was really making my living as a guitar teacher back home. It was in November of 2006, and I was on tour with Don Ross, who I mentioned earlier. Rob, the guy who runs Candy Rat Records (the independent label I'm with), [wanted to] shoot some videos on my day off and put them on YouTube, which was still relatively new at the time. I had maybe been on YouTube once or twice. But then it really took off and [the video] was on the front page ... the one video, the song "Drifting" of mine, has had like 11.5 million views. The cool thing about YouTube is that it's so democratic.
This interview aired live on WMFO 91.5 FM on Monday, Feb. 11.
