Hello, My Name Is Andy
Hello, My Name Is Andy
Q&A With Andy McKee
IE: What first attracted you to playing the guitar and how old were you?
Andy McKee: I was 13 when I got my first guitar and I asked for a guitar for my birthday that year because I heard Eric Johnson on the radio. They played a clip of “Cliffs Of Dover” and I had never heard instrumental guitar music before. I was just blown away.
IE: Is that the kind of music you originally wanted to play?
AM: Yes. I was also into Metallica and some of the heavy metal-type bands and I started working on a lot of that when I was first playing guitar.
IE: How did you move from that to playing solo acoustic?
AM: I got into the solo acoustic guitar stuff when I was 16. I had heard a guitar player named Preston Reid who was doing a guitar workshop here in Topeka, and my cousin, who played a lot of electric guitar, said “Let’s go check this guy out.” So we went and saw him and I was just blown away that night with the things he could do with just one guitar. It was a couple years later when I started to try and get into playing solo acoustic guitar pieces and writing my own stuff and I started to go that direction primarily.
IE: How has You Tube changed your life?
AM: Pretty dramatically [laughs]. I taught guitar lessons here in Topeka, Kansas for about 10 years as my primary source of income, but ever since I was 14 I wanted to play guitar for a living. We posted those videos in November of 2006 and it just started to take off. I started getting more requests to play and selling more CDs and it was like, “What’s going on here?” They put me on the front page of the Web site and that was amazing. I am doing 150 to 200 shows a year now.
IE: Why do you think it caught on so strongly?
AM: It’s a bit hard to say. It’s not something you would find on MTV or anything. Having it on the front page of You Tube exposed me to a lot of people who had never taken in solo acoustic guitar music before or, if they had, it was seeing Esteban on TV at 3 in the morning [laughs]. Whatever it is, it really gives you hope that you can actually make a living doing this solo acoustic guitar stuff.
Andy McKee’s acoustic covers and originals are among You Tube’s most-viewed music clips. Gates Of Gnomeria (Candyrat) is available now. Q&A by Mike O’Cull.
