‘Thrift Shop’ Singer Pens #TheBookofWanz

Michael A. Wansley wants to drive his own boat. But, to do this anytime soon he’s going to have to get over some pretty debilitating fears. 

Wansley, who famously sang the hook in the Macklemore & Ryan Lewis song, “Thrift Shop,” appears on the water in a scene for the song’s video, driving a boat with Macklemore standing next to him. The boat he wants to drive, of course, is a metaphor, but it’s an apt one. It was his deep-voiced crooning that helped make “Thrift Shop” internationally known, yet Wansley (or “Wanz,” as he’s known), has had trouble breaking through commercially on his own. 

“The truth is,” he says, eating a cup of yogurt upstairs in the Fremont neighborhood Starbucks, “most people don’t care. They’re doing their own thing, trying to take care of their own issues. You know, my dad said to me a long time ago, ‘Son, you gotta drive your own boat’ and in the video I’m driving somebody else’s.” 

The man who’s been seen in a flamboyant peach suit dancing in “Thrift Shop” over 800 million times on YouTube alone, says his current goal is not to make it big, not to touch fame again. What he wants is a more day-to-day reality, to “be less afraid.” It’s a mantra he’s trying to repeat to himself in order to build and sustain confidence. 

Words of wisdom are nothing new for Wanz. His father, a retired military man, was a “quasi philosopher” who would say things like “never burn a bridge you might need to escape over” and Wanz himself is constantly trying to reduce life’s difficulties into compact phrases that sum up how to think, what to say and what to do. 

This practice has manifested into a book Wanz recently wrote and published, called #TheBookofWanz, based on Tweets the singer wrote while on tour with Macklemore and a bevy of Seattle musicians, many of whom were much younger than he (Wanz is now 54) and who weren’t around when he was drinking beer in Seattle with friends in bands like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden. 

“I started figuring out,” he says, “there are more things that bind us as human beings than things that separate us.” As a result, he started Tweeting. Phrases like, “Until you make peace with your insides, you’ll never be satisfied with your outsides” and “When you believe you know it all, you miss what you need to learn or could have learned” all with the tag, #TheBookOfWanz. 

While Wanz was once on top of the world, performing across the globe to thousands of people, the high created an inevitable crash, what he calls the “come down of 2014.” 

“After the Grammys,” he says, “’Thrift Shop’ had done all it could do, so what’s next? It was like walking into a grocery store when you’re starving, but you have to make a choice, what are you gonna pick?” He says he turned some opportunities down, which he now regrets, and didn’t like being put into the box of the man in the peach suit, not realizing that it was possibly his way into more commercial success. “I knew I had so much more than that suit, my mistake was not realizing it was the doorknob that turned the door that would lead to new opportunities.” 

The book began in 2014 at the suggestion of Seattle violinist Andrew Joslyn, who was also on tour with Wanz. It took eight months to write and, while it’s available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble as an e-book, Wanz is in the process of printing copies and setting up a live reading. But it’s a long process and one he’s doing mostly on his own amid bouts with depression. “I’ve done a lot of work on myself in the past six months,” he admits. “If you print one thing, let it be this: What’s the secret of life? Dealing with what you get the best that you can.” 

As Wanz continues to come out of the haze of all his success and tries to resituate himself in the world, he tries to remember that there is a lot of good happening around him and he takes solace in the idea that people everywhere are mostly similar, dealing with their problems and searching for joy. “It’s about bringing people together,” he says.

Watch “Thrift Shop” here: