Happy late 11th birthday to The Wolf! Released 9/9/03.
This contains over an hour of AWK demos! It’s an 11 year-old recording session from Andrew W.K.’s second LP, The Wolf. The “Ruffs” are dated April 23rd, 2003. That’s almost 5 months before The Wolf was released. I can’t believe we are lucky enough for stuff like this to still exist. Not only that but by a series of fortunate events I’ve recently obtained it and have archived it to you for your party pleasure.
Tracklisting
- Blow Your Bone (Victory Strikes Again)
- Never Ending Party (Long Live The Party)
- Addicted To Life (We’re Not Gunna Get Old)
- Free Jumps (vocals)
- I Love Music
- I’m Totally Stupid
- Never Let Down
- New Piano Song (The End of Our Lives)
- New Song (World)
- Really In Love
- Tear It Up (vocals)
- The Mom (The Song)
- Your Rules
There’s a couple interesting things to point out in the track listing. First of all, apparently the working title for “Victory Strikes Again” AND the album was originally “Blow Your Bone”. Based on an early ad for the album I’ve mocked up what the potential artwork would have looked like for that album. I’ve read different stories and Andrew even gave me another rendition of why the album title was changed to “The Wolf”. Whatever the actual reason is, sometime between April and September it was in fact changed.
Next is track #2 “Never Ending Party”, simply put the track’s name changed to “Long Live The Party”. The musical arrangement of “We’re Not Gunna Get Old” was going to be featured on The Wolf but was retitled to “Addicted To Life”. Obviously since there are no lyrics inserted at this point in the recording process it’s hard to know how different the song was going to be. A lot of the tracks from The Wolf are actually carried over tracks from the 1999 recording sessions and even songs considered and re-recorded for I Get Wet. However that’s not the case for “The End of Our Lives” it was written explicitly for this album, which makes sense why it’s temporarily titled “New Piano Song”. –This kind of made me chuckle, because aren’t all his songs “new piano songs”? Perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of the item is track #9, an entirely new song we’ve never heard before! 11 years later and we’re finally hearing it from the cutting room floor. This version of “Really In Love” is 7 minutes and 30 seconds long. Holy cow! I’m not the sharpest knife in the box so it wasn’t until I read the name for #12 did I ever realize the acronym for the “Mother of Mankind” album is MOM. It would have been really interesting to listen to a different version of “Don’t Ever Stop The Noise” & “The Song” reworked as “The Mom”. One has to wonder what in the world that would have sounded like?!
You’ll notice quickly while listening that most of the tracks don’t have lyrics. So it almost plays as the long rumored all-instrumental album Andrew was planning to release. So until that pans out enjoy these archived tracks.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, I plan on archiving even more stuff next week so please spread the word and check back soon.
Was there anything I missed? Let me know what cool things you noticed in the forum. And remember you need to join the fun club to download anything on the site. Enjoy!
Archived: 2003-04-23-AWK Ruffs [Demo]