I Get Wet

The album was made while Andrew W.K. was living in New York City. It is built out of many layers of overdubs, done to make the record "sound as party as we could make it sound" and so that the songs would sound like one instrument rather than a collection of separate players. In July 2001 he and Jimmy Coup went to Minneapolis to record with John Fields at SubJersey Studio, and in August the three of them went to Sherman Oaks in California to mix with Mike Shipley at Record One. One starting point was his own liking for intense music in a major key, which he traces to playing the piano as a child. Another was "We Are the World" by USA for Africa: he was struck by all those singers going at once, a "powerful sound, like an orchestra", and wanted to make music that sounded like that. The cover, photographed by Roe Ethridge, shows him with wet hair and a stream of blood running from his nose, and it caused a row for suggesting cocaine and violence. He first said he had hit himself in the face with a piece of cinder block during the shoot, then explained that this had not produced enough blood and that he had topped it up with animal blood from a butcher's shop. The album went to number one on Billboard's Top Heatseekers chart. It came out first in Britain and Australia in November 2001; the American pressing followed on 26 March 2002. The running order here is the original's as printed.