Did you have to go to the studio immediately in some mad dash? Wanz: I was laying in bed watching Nightline , surfing Facebook on my laptop when my phone rang. It was a guy that I had done hook work within the early s and he never called. He usually only texted or emailed. So, I thought something was wrong. And about 20 minutes of that and I walked in and I was introduced to Ben [a.
Macklemore] and Ryan. I had never heard of them. So, it was cool. Ryan played the track and Ben had a Steno pad and he was reading me the words. I was getting the vibe. And the first thing that came out of my mouth is what you hear on the record. Wanz: Yup! They put me in the booth and we went through the chorus a couple of times and went through, like, this is the way the bridge goes, boom-boom-boom. I spent maybe 45 minutes in the booth and they were cutting me a check and I went home.
And nobody thought anything of it. Wanz: Ben already had the chorus and he was feeding the words to me, right? He would feed them to me in a rhythm. AS: After the demo from that first night, when did you hear the song done for the first time and what did you think? I was walking into work one day and Ryan asked me if I wanted to be a part of the video. We did some INXS covers.
Then… I got asked to front a band called the Ghetto Monks and saw a little bit of success. That band kind of went its way and fell off. Then it was about five or six years ago, I started investing in writing my own music because I wasn't hearing what I wanted to hear. I didn't see it in the clubs. I didn't see what I was hearing in my head.
How did you get linked with Macklemore and Ryan Lewis? Through a strange twist, I got connected with a guy named D-Sane who is the owner of Street Level Records and he was doing underground hip-hop here in the North End of Seattle.
One of his guys called me and asked me to sing a hook on one of his songs, and everybody dug it. That led to my career in singing hooks.
So that same guy calls me on Monday night in July and asks if I've heard of a guy named Macklemore and I said I'd heard of him but I wasn't familiar with the music. He was looking for a guy that sounds like Nate Dogg. He called me back like five minutes later and said they want to bring you in.
So 45 minutes later I'm at the studio and meeting Ben and Ryan for the first time and talking about what my history is, Ghetto Monks this and my own originals and what I wanted to do. Ben showed me the hook for 'Thrift Shop' and said 'Sort of like this. I go in and get levels and 45 minutes later, I'm going home. Pretty quick, quicker than anybody imagined.
How was it shooting the video for "Thrift Shop? By this time, I hadn't heard the whole song. It's been about six weeks since I recorded the session and I still haven't heard the song. So Ryan is taking me up to catch a bus on the North End and I was asking him to play the final song and it was the first time I heard it and I loved it and thought it was great.
The video dropped and I'm sitting at my desk watching the numbers go up, it got up to about 1,, 1,, I just looked out the window and went, uh oh. I came back the next day and it had tripled in size, and I said, uh oh, and started pushing it out to my Facebook people, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I got asked to go on tour. I had never been on tour before. Then, I'm on the phone with my boss' boss and the HR person and they're saying, are you going to come back? And I said, well, at my age, these kinds of opportunities don't come along.
I don't think it's ever going to happen again. So I've got to stay out here and do this, because this is a dream come true. Dream come true shit for me. Next, Wanz is preparing to tour Australia with Macklemore, and he's also working on his own brand, setting up a merch website, working on a new EP, and looking to find a way to profit off a series of sayings he's coined over the years, referred to collectively by at least one tourmate as "The Book of Wanz.
Can you do that? And I'm like 'I could, but I'm not going to,'" he relates, laughing. Asked if he's worried about being pigeonholed by that one lyric, Wanz says he's already made peace with it. Everybody has their thing, and that's gonna be mine. The question for me has been, 'Am I gonna stay that guy, or am I gonna be the guy who came in as this, and then they found everything else?
In the meantime, Wanz is enjoying his long-delayed success, getting to make his kids proud. Good on ya! We thought it couldn't get better after Harry Styles in , but the Met Gala is already our favorite. Up Next.
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