Michael Andrews

It is difficult to effectively qualify the many talents of Michael Andrews. Simply stated, Andrews is a music maker. He is equally comfortable in the roles of composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter. He has scored cool indie and art house films, big-budget studio productions, network television shows and animated shorts.

Andrews has performed and recorded music with some of today's most successful artists but prefers helping to shape and define the careers of people that you've probably never heard of. In the last ten years or so Mike has humbly assembled a body of work that includes more than 40 different projects in as many different fields including most recently a collection of heartbreaking original songs, entitled "Hand On String." In an industry where the quality of one's work is often measured by the girth of their celebrity, you might be pleasantly surprised to find that if Andrews' name is not yet familiar to you, his uniquely beautiful music just might be.

Andrews wrote and performed the original score music for Miranda July's Caméra d'or (Cannes) award-winning film Me and You and Everyone We Know. He composed score music for Donnie Darko, including the celebrated cover of Tears for Fears' "Mad World," which became the U.K.'s Christmas no. 1 single in 2003. He scored Orange County, Cypher and Nothing and co-scored Zero Effect. Andrews' television credits include Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, Wonderfalls and Dead Last. Andrews is responsible for the music on animated installations of renowned graphic artist Geoff McFetridge. He has produced records with Inara George, Brendan Benson, DJ Greyboy and Metric. Andrews was a founding member of The Greyboy Allstars, Elgin Park and The Origin.

Though his musical accomplishments quietly span the broad gamut of contemporary media, industry and genre, the music itself is always intensely personal, weird yet accessible, funny and sad, thoughtful and intimate, all the while wholly and ironically human.

As a score composer, Andrews has an eerie knack for understanding the subtleties of a given character; he exposes that character's emotional inner workings, illuminates the abstract and gives voice to the real person beneath the facade. He does the same with musicians that he works with, encouraging them to make it that personal, that honest. His own solo work as a singer and songwriter reflect the same humble focused integrity. The love, loss, fear, hope and pain in "Hand On String" are all real, all his, and he approaches them with the same stark, at times unnerving, honesty exemplified by everything in his heroically and resolutely obscure professional career.

Andrews neither reads nor writes music. He has never formally studied any of the various instruments that he plays, much less music theory, composition, arrangement, orchestration or production. Instead, he continues to straddle all superficial boundaries of genre and media, as well as their respective subdivisions, with music that comes unobstructed from the heart of a normal person who is paying very close, thoughtful attention.

Fittingly, Andrews' favorite quote about his music comes not from a DJ, celebrity, music magazine or industry rag, but from a fan who posted on Amazon.com: "It's the kind of music that gets you to thinking how miraculous it is to be alive, you know, like, 'Hey, look at my hand and how all my fingers move when I want them to and what about all the blood that's flowing through my body right now and what was the world like before I existed and what will it be like when I'm gone."

Andrews continues to toil away on projects big and small in the backyard studio that he built from the ground up, surrounded by an eclectic collection of instruments, toys and recording gizmos amassed from two decades of obsessively combing classified ads, garage sales and junk shops. Newer projects include the feature films Daddy's Home, directed by Sean Anders and Dirty Grandpa, directed by Dan Mazar, as well as musical collaborations with Van Dyke Parks (Brian Wilson, Randy Newman, Arlo Guthrie, Ry Cooder, Phil Ochs, Rufus Wainwright), Inara George Los Angeles indie artist Becky Stark and her band Lavender Diamond.

Universal Pictures