Andrew McCormick is a wonderfully odd kid.
He’s that type of person that you meet once in a great while. The type of person that once you walk away from them you find yourself smiling and shaking your head slightly and when you tell people about your encounter the conversation always begins with, “Have you met this kid?”
He sits at his family’s old Story & Clark upright piano—once the family dog Charlie is safely secured—and curls his long brown hair behind his ear saying, “I never know what to play when people ask me to play them something,” before his fingers begin to bounce joyfully over the keyboard.
That hair of his is now shoulder length. He says he began growing it out in the fifth grade so he could look more like a character he had drawn. It’s parted down the middle and curls slightly at the bottom to frame a patchy pubescent growth of facial hair.
His father, Dave McCormick, will tell you that Andrew is “definitely his own person”.
And Andrew McCormick (only a sophomore at Yellow Medicine East) is definitely a musician. And being Andrew he is a wonderfully odd musician.
I ask him about the bass line in a song he’s been playing me. I can pound a bit on the piano—but nothing like Andrew—and the bass line sounds wonderfully complicated and looks horribly difficult. “Well the first part,” he says. “This part is just ‘Play that Funky Music’,”(Dum, dum, dum, dum, da, dum, da, dum). That part I get before he loses me completely with the second phrase and the filler. And I realize I am a hack compared to the likes of Andrew McCormick.
Along with the piano, he can play nearly every instrument in the band. Every instrument he’s managed to get his hands on anyway. There are a few like the oboe and bassoon he still dreams of playing and laments that he hasn’t been able to get his hands on them for long enough to become proficient.
He began playing in the pep band his dad directed in the fifth grade—just a few months after picking up a trombone. This was about the same time he began writing and recording parody songs and now he says he’s working on his seventh album having just finished his first greatest hits album entitled ‘The Essential Andrclesco’. (Yeah, that’s right, a greatest hits album from a sophomore in high school...Funny, right?)
