The masters of one-man-band bedroom pop past and present leave me in awe, as the only things rivaling their ingenuity are their eccentricity and inscrutability. From Brian Wilson to Todd Rundgren to Mac DeMarco, what makes them tick? How is it that they can hear—in Wilson’s words—symphonies to God in their head? Why are they equal parts—in Rundgren’s words—wizards and true stars, simultaneously? Drew Stroik could rank among those names, now that a posthumous release of his debut album 65th & York and documentary short are being released in his memory, the latter of which makes its debut below.
The story that Drew Stroik: Unknown Pop Wizard tells seems simple: unschooled neophyte becomes a virtuoso lo-fi composer whiz no sooner than his mom gifts him a guitar at age 12, and later getting a hold of a plastic Yamaha keyboard. Somewhere in that equation is Stroik’s love of latter-day animated Disney film scores, life above a funeral parlor, and hangouts during Veruca Salt rehearsals. Fusing contagiously dreamy, impossibly sequence-worthy, synth-layered songs from uncorrected finger-flicked drum sounds and a sweetly poignant voice only furthers his legend as the homemade-pop creative catches the attention of new email buddy Andy Chase of Ivy—whose NYC-based label Unfiltered Records nurtured and signed a 23-year-old Stroik in 2010—and brings in equally attentive producer-collaborator Bruce Driscoll for further attention and devotion.
“As early as 2007, Drew became my email pen pal, sending me all of his music on MP3s, then cassettes, listening to his stuff on headphones at night,” notes Chase. “There’s only certain music effective in helping me sleep, as I have insomnia. If it’s bad, it keeps me awake, because I’m annoyed. If it’s too good, I stay awake being jealous. It has to be weird enough, and sparkly enough, and 3D enough to take me into another world and drift away. That’s what Stroik did: create a three-dimensional world, the first music for me that created space and ambience. That was evocative. But Drew was pop. Experimental, contagious pop.”
“That’s what Stroik did: create a three-dimensional world, the first music for me that created space and ambience. That was evocative. But Drew was pop. Experimental, contagious pop.” — Andy Chase
“What Andy sent me of Stroik—demos at first—was beautiful,” adds Driscoll. “I’d never heard anyone layering their vocals in quite that way. The way he sang was unique to him. I don’t have a comparison, really. Maybe Mac DeMarco now, but certainly not then, not 2010. Drew took it to a more cinematic thing. I remember asking his mom what he was listening to as a kid, and she said the Lion King soundtrack. That’s what I heard in him: the emotion of those movie scores. You feel something when you listen to him. There’s a profound sadness to his songs, and they were totally unique to him because he didn’t have any training. It just all came out of him. He was his own thing.”
That you don’t own the fruit of their collaboration with Stroik, or have even heard one of his bittersweet songs—over 100 unreleased tracks—until now is what makes Drew Stroik: Unknown Pop Wizard a tragic new documentary classic. A rootless youth doused by bountiful amounts of alcohol, fueled by the loneliness that fills his lyrics, an inability to play live beyond the bedroom—all inflamed by addiction, deep depressions, vicious rage, and a runaway ego—caused Stroik to abuse the very mentors meant to speed his artistic process and get his beautiful music to market. “At the time, he certainly pressured Andy, continuously, to release the album,” Driscoll says.
Not long after he’d signed, a heartbroken Chase gave Stroik back his finished recordings, which never saw the light of day, or even any effort to release them from their maker. “When my label and I parted ways with Drew in 2012, we wished him well and good luck, and certainly the documentary shows a lot of color around that experience,” says Chase. “But we fully expected that Drew would find a way to release it.” And though Stroik eventually home-recorded even more great songs beyond his first unreleased album’s material, mental anguish, poverty, self-doubt, and addiction gets the worst of him, and, by 2022, at the age of 35, Stroik passed away from the ravages of fentanyl. “We were shocked and saddened, year-after-year, that his album hadn’t come out,” says Chase. “The album was in Drew’s hands until, at his passing, it went into his mom’s hands. The three of us regrouped and realized that if Drew couldn’t get his album out, that we were going to—his passing was, sadly, the catalyst for making sure all of this happened in his name.”
Adds Driscoll, “We didn’t even think about doing a documentary. When Drew died, his mother couldn’t even listen to his music for some time. Then she began posting it on TikTok, so that he wouldn’t be forgotten. People asked where they could get this, and she asked us to get involved to release the music. But there was no footage of him, save for several music videos that got made.” That is until Chase remembered that he had sent a documentarian down to film Drew when he moved to North Carolina: Josh Stoddard. “Josh was the one who reported back to us that a live show that he tried to film of Drew’s in North Carolina was a disaster, due to Stroik’s serious drinking,” says Chase.
That Stoddard, too, had died in the interim, and that Chase had to find Josh’s sister to track down that footage (“a treasure trove, too,” notes Chase) on her late brother’s collection of hard drives, only deepens the mysterious fates of all things Stroik. Discretely working on releasing the music of 65th & York, and deciding that the best manner in which to illustrate the fullest picture of who Stroik was meant a documentary film, you immediately sense how dedicated these two men are to their one-time friend and fellow artist. Despite having over 10 years pass, despite all the troubles that he put them through both professionally and personally, Chase and Driscoll remain emotionally connected to Stroik, his biggest fans and cheerleaders. But why? Who would willingly come back to someone who threw away such an opportunity and gave them hell when trying?
When I consider how turned off and turned around I would be by such actions as Stroik’s (they received “a lot of instability and crazy emails from him,” even after Drew was let go from the label and gifted his masters), Chase and Driscoll come across like saints. “I think that he was sadly out of step with where the music industry was at that point, 2009, 2010,” says Chase. “We were able to film our own videos with him then, but had he come out earlier, Drew would have been more manhandled by the labels. Then the onus wouldn’t have been on him to have come up with content, because there was no such thing as ‘content.’ There was no social media before that. It was easier back then for an artist to be introverted and antisocial, to be signed and to have stuff created for him on his behalf. Had all this happened for him earlier, I don’t think he would’ve been so self-sabotaged.”
“You feel something when you listen to him. There’s a profound sadness to his songs, and they were totally unique to him because he didn’t have any training.” — Bruce Driscoll
Chase had his own troubles in his own paradise at that time (his label shut down several years after Stroik’s departure), and perhaps might have had greater patience with ranting emails. Chase is also quick to credit Drew’s mom and stepdad, who did everything loving for their son. Driscoll notes, too, that Stroik was deep within his own bubble and entirely specific about living within its walls. “He really didn’t know much about the industry or the way it worked. He didn’t have an older brother or someone he knew who played—he was so in-his-room, and just about songwriting and the production of it. It was frustrating, but we revered him so much, and were just so forgiving of any of the addiction stuff and those quirks. We were just trying to keep the noise out of our own lives, as well, trying to survive and get by. I never ever felt angry about it, though.”
The beauty, then, in Stroik’s music and a life lived in dedication to that sound is that it will never be forgotten. Not on these men’s watch. “It’s as if Drew was put on this earth to make those 100-plus songs,” says Driscoll. “Drew didn’t go out. He didn’t have friends. He had this. He was a being put on this planet to make music, and that truly resonated with Andy, with me, and with anyone we played his music for over the past however many years. And it felt wrong to keep all that music to ourselves, because we’d continued to listen to his music throughout those years.” FL
