Andrew Combs doesn’t want to repeat himself. It’s his number one rule, his guiding principle, the only thing he’s really sure of as an artist. in fact, stressing that despite his traditionalist approach to songwriting and despite the fact that iconic 70’s singer-songwriters like Guy Clark and Paul Simon get tossed around every time he’s written about, Combs has little patience for musical retro-revivalism.
“I like art to push you in new directions and make you think and not just regurgitate what’s already been done, even though we all do that. I’ve done it, and still do it; To a certain degree, you can’t not do it. But I try,” says the 30-year-old songwriter.
Over the past five years, Combs has pulled off the trickiest of feats for a singer-songwriter, releasing three markedly different albums that nevertheless share a deeper sense of continuity in voice. Whereas his 2012 trad-country debut Worried Man presented a world of mid-twenties mishap and young Nashville man blues, 2015’s follow-up All These Dreams established the singer as a polished crooner gradually coming into his own as a narrative storyteller.
On Canyons Of My Mind, however, Combs blooms into a proper adult songwriter, one daring enough to both probe inward and reach outward, to hold a mirror up to one’s own interior insecurities and anxieties while at the same time acknowledging, for the first real time, that there are topical and societal concerns out in the world that are more pressing than one’s own personal life.
Canyons Of My Mind marks a gentle, if determined, split from Combs’ past work. For his new album, he decided to ditch the studio perfectionism of Steelism, the retro-minded Nashville band helmed by Combs’ longtime pals Spencer Cullum Jr. and Jeremy Fetzer that played on All These Dreams. He regrouped with an almost entirely new studio band, and more importantly, a newly determined sense of vision.
The Fat Angel Sings 