Posts Tagged ‘Honest Life’

COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS – ” May Your Kindness Remain “

Posted: March 22, 2018 in MUSIC
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Two of the 10 songs from the new album Courtney Marie Andrews “May Your Kindness Remain”,  astonishingly beautiful new album, have the word kindness in the title. This is not a coincidence. The idea of kindness of empathy, of giving unto others, of needing the same from others — is as central to Andrews’ music  Even when it’s not what she’s singing about, it’s what she’s singing about.

One song on May Your Kindness Remain is about an old, broken-down, permanently messy house and about the couple who used to live there. It’s clear that they’re not still together — “There’s a bed upstairs if you’re ever in town / Or if you need a place to get your feet back on the ground” — but there’s still a fondness, a feeling of togetherness. She sings that the house is their home, that it belongs to both of them, and it feels like a powerful act of generosity, a gift of a song. It’s about how that warmth can outlast the end of a relationship. It’s just lovely.

There are some staggering love songs on May Your Kindness Remain, and there are also songs about needing love, about requiring that sort of empathy. “Lift The Lonely From My Heart” is about depression, about needing someone else’s help to get through it: “Pining, mining for a feeling I’m not finding / Looking to you to tell me what I’m worth.” And then there’s a song like “I’ve Hurt Worse” about knowing that empathy is not coming back to you: “I like you when I have to call you a second time / It keeps me wondering if you are mine / Mother says you love who you think you deserve / But I’ve hurt worse.” Andrews herself calls it a sarcastic song, but I hear a note of longing in there, of self-recrimination. Andrews is working within a country-music tradition that’s long prized a brassy toughness, but even at her hardest, that’s not really what she’s about. And that, in its way, is why a song like that cuts even deeper.

The empathy extends, too, to people beyond Andrews’ relationships, to people she might not know. “Two Cold Nights In Buffalo” is a song about getting stranded in an edge-of-oblivion upstate New York town, taking in all the misery around you, and wondering how shit ever got this bad. It gets a little on-the-nose when Andrews starts wondering how this place ever got this bad — “Is that the American dream dying?” — but it hits hard when she takes in the individual scenes of misery, extrapolating from a glance: “A snowy prison out on Main Street, heaters hang from the cells / A bum searches for shelter, so cold he dreams of hell.” And on “Border Song” she imagines the life of a Mexican immigrant trying to get through the desert, dreaming of a better life that’s still a hell of a lot harder than what most of the people reading this website will ever have to endure: “Stand outside that hardware store / Don’t matter the job they need me for.”

Courtney Marie Andrews’ music isn’t country the way “country” is commonly understood now. It’s country the same way that, for instance, the Black Keys’ music is metal, which is to say that it’s something that could’ve been called country in 1971 even if the tag no longer applies. Her voice has a deep twang, the kind that sticks to you. Her voice is huge, warm, expressive. She’s not a soul singer, but she’s got that soul-singer balance of fire and control, the two elements working together rather than against each other. Occasionally, when she’s really cutting loose, she gets some gospel in her voice. The album has some hazy psychedelic tremolo guitar and some sweaty blues-rock organ. She’s an Americana singer, I guess, but she doesn’t have the sleepy reverence that I (maybe wrongly) tend to associate with Americana singers. Her music is heavy and direct and alive.

Andrews is only 27, but she’s already a veteran. She released her first album when she was a teenager, and she’s been steadily cranking out music for about a decade while moving from Arizona to Seattle to Los Angeles. For a while, she was touring as a keyboardist and a backup singer for Jimmy Eat World. And for a while after that, she was bartending whenever she wasn’t touring. That changed in 2016 with the release of Honest Life, the album that finally got her noticed by the kinds of people who notice really good Americana albums. (I still slept on it.) If Honest Life was Andrews’ break, then May Your Kindness Remain is her big reach.

The new album belongs absolutely to Andrews. She sang and played guitar on every song, and she wrote all of them except for the one she co-wrote with a couple of dudes. She also co-produced it with Mark Howard, a veteran studio type who’s been doing mixing and engineering for people like Bob Dylan and Tom Waits for many years. It’s not a huge leap beyond Honest Life, but it’s got the exact right level of musical lushness. Andrews’ voice dominates, but it doesn’t overpower, and the arrangements shimmer like mirages around her. And for someone like me, someone who’s been shamefully ignorant of all the music that Andrews has been making for all these years, it’s a head-spinning discovery, a warm and gorgeous and fully formed piece of work. The kindness isn’t just in the lyrics. It’s in the way music like this can nourish you, can make your insides glow. An album like this can be a refuge.

May Your Kindness Remain is out on 23rd March on Fat Possum Records/Mama Bird Recordings.

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thanks to Stereogum

COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS – ” Live On KEXP “

Posted: November 25, 2017 in MUSIC
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Courtney Marie Andrews performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded September 7th, 2016.

Andrews is only 25 but has already spent almost a decade on the road as a professional musician, touring since she was 16, singing backing vocals for arena rock band Jimmy Eat World and travelling as lead guitarist for cult Americana star Damien Jurado.

She has also recorded five previous albums of poetic heart-on-her-sleeve sensitive singer-songwriting, so when she tells us “this ain’t no rookie dreaming” on the opening of her sixth release, you can genuinely sense the weight of experience in her voice. Her album “Honest Life” is full of songs of longing and regret, tinged by a belief in the redemptive possibilities of change and wrapped up in stories of everyday, hard-working lives. Classic country material, in other words.

Songs: How Quickly Your Heart Mends,  Irene,  Table For One,  Rookie Dreaming

COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS – ” Honest Life ” Best Albums Of 2017

Posted: November 20, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Life out on the lonely road… It’s a tale that many musicians sing about, longing for a day they can actually come home from touring around the world, meeting faceless fans and playing show after show. It can get lonesome on tour, and yet, somehow, they can’t shed their vagabond ways.

But that’s not the case for Courtney Marie Andrews, who had toured in other people’s bands for a decade before taking a break to bartend in a small Washington town these past few years. Pushing pause on non-stop touring allowed her to sit back and re-evaluate, sparking the thesis for the album “Honest Life” via Fat Possum Records, with a pressing of the deluxe edition. At 16, Andrews left her Arizona home to become transient, playing and busking in bars and cafes around the country. She continued on as a session singer and touring musician for nearly 40 artists, from Jimmy Eat World to Damien Jurado.
http:/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xz6nOLSF7I

Her work took her all around the world, but at some point, she realized she’d lost touch with reality.“You can start to just stop calling people or stop keeping up with the people that you know and love,” Andrews said, calling from an unseasonably warm Seattle. “All of a sudden it’s been three years and you haven’t seen them.”In Washington, Andrews made connections again, getting to know people at the bar and laying down tracks for Honest Life with a trusted group of musicians. Together, the band sounds like home. Drums chug away at moderate paces, piano glitters organically over top and the guitars are cozy. In the final track, she even added a somber arrangement of strings, gifted by her friend Andrew Joslyn.
Over the majority of the album, a pedal steel guitar drifts lazily under the melody, tangling with Andrews’ voice. With her Emmylou Harris-like pipes and the pedal steel, the album is what some people have called “country.”“When I went in to make Honest Life, I didn’t think, ‘Oh, I’m making a country record,’” Andrews said. “It’s more about creating a timeless sound. Something that can be released now or in the ’60s or whenever… I take pleasure in being a songwriter and creating a record that’s hard to place where it’s from.”

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Honest Life is technically her sixth album, although she’s kept the first three for herself. It’s her first LP on a label. The album has made several best-of-lists, The accolades couldn’t have come at a better time, she said, when she was wiser about the industry and had gotten some time to grow.

Some people get lucky and their first record is just like a masterpiece fully formed, but that was definitely not me,” Andrews said. “I feel like I’ve really come into my own as a songwriter in the past few years. … I’m glad [the recognition] happened now when I’m a good songwriter, rather than when I was young.”To improve her craft, Andrews studied up on the greats—Neil Young, Bob Dylan, etc.—and in turn, she gained notice from other impressive songwriters, like Ryan Adams and Jurado. With practice and careful observation of legends and her contemporaries, she perfected the “tasteful way of revealing things” in her music.“When I was younger, I would write a song and I would reveal things in every single line, and that was the problem,” Andrews said. “We don’t need to know all that. The listener is overwhelmed. It’s like when you’re at a bar and somebody’s telling you their life story and you’re like, ‘Whoa, calm down.’”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cv0ATLNDJQ

Andrews’ songwriting is more subtle now, but not cryptic. The first track, “Rookie Dreaming,” reflects on her troubadour life and the missteps of what Andrews calls “blind youth.”

“I was moving too fast to see / All the paintings in Paris or sunrise in Barcelona / I was too broke too shallow to dive deep / Too busy carrying the weight of everything,” Andrews sings, her voice rife with mild vibrato, swooping with a twang that’s not Southern, but something unique altogether. She punches syllables that condemn her apathetic lifestyle—“TOO broke, TOO shallow”— while letting other verses flow freely, warm with harmony.

While she criticizes herself in “Rookie Dreaming,” she turns her perspective to address a meek friend in “Irene.” She sings directly to the title character, a pseudonym for the real-life subject, delivering the type of constructive criticism you might not have the guts to give to a friend’s face.

“Gain some confidence, Irene / If you speak let your voice ring out / But keep your grace, Irene / Don’t go falling in love with yourself,” she sings. An organ warbles as Andrews delivers her sermon.

“‘Irene’ was originally written for a friend, but I feel like probably every growing, youthful woman has felt like Irene at one point or the other,” Andrews said. “Every woman who’s amazing but doesn’t really know it yet. We feel like all these magazines and articles that are saying, ‘No, we’re not good enough’ … It’s sort of realizing that that’s total bullshit and you are awesome and you just have to know it.”

Not only did Andrews take care of all the songwriting on Honest Life, but she was the sole producer on the album—essential for keeping control in the studio.

“With this record, I knew so clearly what I wanted that I didn’t want distractions or arguments,” Andrews said. “One person sees it one way, one person sees it another way. Sometimes it makes a great record, but for Honest Life, I just wanted the sort of clear, easy, raw and realness. And that’s what we did.”

As for settling down and slinging drinks, Andrews knew that wouldn’t last forever. She said she’s always going to travel in the name of music. But this time, she’s not going to be singing anyone else’s songs. She’s at center stage now, and she’s ready to brave the lonely road once more.

“A lot of Honest Life was realizing that I didn’t want to tour as a backup singer anymore,” Andrews said. “If was going to be on the road, it was going to be for me, for my songs, for the dreams that I’ve always had as a teenager and as a young adult. Bartending is not my career path. Music is everything.”

COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS – ” Sea Town / Near You “

Posted: September 10, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Photo published for Courtney Marie Andrews gig review: Charming performer unleashes a wealth of new material

From the bonus 7″ accompanying the re-issue of Honest Life, out September 15th, 2017 on Fat Possum / Mama Bird Recording Co. Also on 7″ in Europe via Loose Music.

From the bonus 7″ accompanying the re-issue of Honest Life, out September 15, 2017 on Fat Possum / Mama Bird Recording Co.

COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS – ” Near You “

Posted: August 24, 2017 in MUSIC
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At just 16 years old, Courtney Marie Andrews left home in Arizona for her first tour. She traveled up and down the West Coast, busking and playing any bars or cafés that would have her. Soon after, she took a Greyhound bus four nights straight from Phoenix to New York to do the same on the East Coast. For a decade or so since, Courtney’s been a session and backup singer and guitarist for nearly 40 artists, from Jimmy Eat World to Damien Jurado. She never stopped writing her own material, though. Picking up admirers like Jurado and Ryan Adams along the way, she has quietly earned a reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter.

With plans to settle down for a bit and focus on her own songs, Courtney moved to the Northwest in 2011 to record her last full-length record On My Page. However, the record had hardly been released before she was on the road again performing other artists’ songs, eventually leading her overseas to play guitar and sing with Belgian star Milow. At the tour’s end, though, the other session players joined her to record her 2014 EP Leuven Letters in one take.

It was during this time that Courtney also wrote many of the songs on Honest Life. She found herself realizing the impact of growing up on the road and this constant reconciling between her and other’s art and identity. Courtney will take it from there:

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While in Belgium for four months, I was going through a major heartbreak. I started growing homesick for America and the comfort of family and friends, and life in the states. That’s where I wrote the first songs for Honest Life. It was a giant hurdle in my life. My first true growing pains as a woman. That’s why in a sense, I feel this record is a coming of age album. A common thread that runs through the songs, is a great desire to fit somewhere, when nowhere fits. And wanting to get back home to the people I know and love. Once I got back to the states, I started to bartend at a small town tavern. I was home for awhile, and needed to post up while rehearsing with the band for the record. At the tavern, I felt I could truly empathize with the stories and lives of the people there. I wrote the other half of the songs about coming home and feeling a sense of belonging again. A lot of the stories at that tavern definitely ran parallel with my own, even though our lives were so different. I was the “musician girl.”  They were farmers, construction workers, plumbers, waitresses, and cashiers. But, no matter how different, I felt we were all trying to live our most honest life.

Courtney produced the entire record herself at Litho Studios in Seattle with recording engineer Floyd Reitsma. Honest Life is available now on LP, CD from Mama Bird Recording Co. / Fat Possum Records (USA/World) and Loose Music (Europe).

Look for ‘Honest Life’ in independent record stores on September 15th An exclusive colour LP with a bonus 7″ that includes “Near You”.

‘Irene’ from the album Honest Life. Available now from Mama Bird Recording Co. / Fat Possum Records:

COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS – ” Irene “

Posted: July 26, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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There’s a trace of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Little Tramp” in the way Courtney Marie Andrews struts her way through The Family Grocer in the new video for “Irene.” Her character works for a small-minded manager at a local grocery store in rural Washington state. Playful at heart, she is a constant disappointment to her employer, whose managerial responsibility seems to be consumed entirely by containing Andrews’ joie de vivre. Few characters could do justice to the irrepressible heart of this sweet, uplifting song — this one does.

“Irene” is the third track off Andrews’ “Honest Life”, released last year by the Pacific Northwestern songwriter. The song has an encouraging swagger that’s hard to resist, one that leaves a perfect space for Andrews‘ strong, swooping voice.

Andrews teamed up once again with director Josh Perrault, who has previously made videos for her songs . She wrote “Irene” for a friend who was going through a tough time — something that Andrews, who has been a hard-touring musician since age 16, surely knows something about.

“Irene is the little voice inside most of us, that says we aren’t good enough, or strong enough,” said Andrews.  “It’s about shutting that voice off, while also accepting life’s inevitable struggles. It’s about coming to terms with who you are, and believing in that person.”

A new Mama Bird +Fat Possum Records pressing of ‘Honest Life’ will be in indie stores on September 15th on an exclusive coke-bottle green vinyl. Limited to 400 copies, it Includes a bonus 7″ of unreleased recordings!

COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS – ” Honest Life “

Posted: December 2, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Courtney Marie Andrews Honest Life

Courtney Marie Andrews is possibiy the best songwriter you’ve never heard of. If you have heard of her, you’ve likely heard her name mentioned in the same breath as another, more iconic songwriter: Joni Mitchell. Andrews’ breakout album Honest Life, which, despite the assumption that it’s her debut (after all, what a shame that an artist of this level of talent has flown under the radar since 2008), is her sixth solo album. The Joni Mitchell comparisons are apt, both for Andrews’ nimble, expressive vocals and her way with a turn of phrase. What makes Andrews so special, however, is that her influences never verge on the derivative. Single “Irene,” with its percussive piano and pointed, progressive lyrics

(“The heart is funny, Irene/ You can’t control who it wants to love/ So let it love, Irene/ Man or woman or anyone it wants”), is unlike any other song released this year; Andrews herself is unlike any other artist.

Since “Honest Life” was released. This record has changed my life in so many ways. A lot of these songs were written while I was living in Belgium and processing a very painful breakup. I’d eat half a croissant a day, drink wine in the cafe across from my apartment, and write every crazy line or thought that popped into my head. I felt young and old, wise and dumb, all at once. Songs were pouring out of me, and when I was dry I’d wander aimlessly down the cobble stone streets until another song came crawling out. It was a dark time, but writing those songs saved me.
Before living in Belgium, I sent my demos to many producers whom all felt that I either needed lots of production or a co-writer to make a good record. One producer pissed me off so much when he brought in a co-writer without telling me. I was so insulted that I wrote “Rookie Dreaming” “Honest Life” and “Put The Fire Out” in one night just to prove to him I didn’t need help writing songs. It was after that, I knew I needed to have my friends on the record. I needed to make something real, the exact way I wanted it. So I went back to Seattle, got my friends together and produced a record that I was proud of, on my own terms. Intuition is magic, and I’ll continue to try and follow my instincts whenever it comes to matters of art and the heart.
I truly don’t know where I’d be without songs, music, and the brilliant people who help and hold me and my work up every day. I’m eternally grateful to be writing, and living a life I’ve always felt I was made for. Thank you.