root salad
Courtney Marie Andrews
The country songwriter talks to Elizabeth Kinder.
ain’t free/Always chained to when I leave.” So sings roots/country artist Courtney Marie Andrews in Table For One, on her much-lauded album Honest Life. Andrews, however, is not an old and knackered alco- holic. A fresh-faced twenty-six-year-old when Honest Life came out in 2016, her next album May Your Kindness Remain was released this March. Neil McCormack, writing in the Telegraph, reckons she “may be the finest young singer-songwriter in America,” placing her in a line descending from Gram Parsons, John Prine (for the “poetic economy of her lyrics”) and Emmy- lou Harris, for her vocal style.
“I
We meet the morning after Andrews bagged the gong for Best International Artist at the UK Americana awards. She’s had no sleep but is radiantly pretty and rock- ing that ’70s straight long hair-with-a-fringe look that suggests bare feet, a free spirit and the female singers from Laurel Canyon to whom she’s often compared. Her songs, snapshots of life – “The juke box is playing a sad country song/For all the ugly Ameri- cans/Now I feel like one of them/Dancing alone and broken by the freedom” – spring from experience. Andrews has been on the road since she left her home in Phoenix Ari- zona to busk up and down the coast of Cali- fornia at the age of sixteen.
She comes from a long line of roofers. “Roofers on both sides of the family; dad was a roofer, my grandfathers were roofers, my uncles…” Her mother “worked two jobs” whilst bringing up her daughter (Andrews’ parents separated before she was born) and they “moved around a lot until mum got a house” when Andrews was thirteen. “Mum wanted me to know things, so she read to me,” and Andrews grew up loving “orphan- type girl characters like Pippy Longstocking and Matilda who live adventurous lives.”
Top 40 country played on the radio and musicals on the TV. Little Orphan Annie and Singing In The Rain inspired Andrews to sing in school talent competitions from the age of five, where straight off she secured a place in the show with Tomorrow. The cut- throat competition underpinning American life had hit home by the time she was eight. “I had many defeats. My performance of Singing In The Rain didn’t pass the audition. It was just too showy.” Consequently Andrews delivers a raw authenticity that had the Guardian’s Laura Barton exclaiming “I heard Courtney Marie Andrews’ song Put
’m just waiting for the bar to open/Cause I’m a little bit lone- ly/A little bit stoned/And I’m ready to go home/… This life it
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The Fire Out. In its three and a half minutes, she seemed to articulate what I had spent 18 months trying to say.”
A
gift of a blues CD ignited eight- year-old Andrews’ passion for the guitar. Her mum forked out $30 to buy her one and before her tenth birthday she was setting poems she’d writ- ten to music. Forming an all-girl punk band as a young teen “was rebellious, the punk kids seemed really weird.” She wrote all the songs, got some amps, mics and recording software and by the age of fifteen was post- ing her songs online. “People in the forums would say, ‘You make such great folk music’. I thought ‘folk is old people’s music’, but people kept recommending stuff.” Punk became redundant. Discovering Elliot Smith, Townes van Zandt, Lucinda Williams, Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Waits and John Prine, she thought, “Here’s music where you can express yourself in many different ways.”
Making her own CDs, she sold them as she busked around the street corners and coffee bars of Phoenix, before heading to the West Coast for more of the same. She was spotted and whisked around the world for a year as a backing singer for Jimmy Eat World. By the time she was twenty she’d
pitched up in Seattle to plunge into its “cool music scene.” “Waiting tables to pay the rent,” Andrews kept on playing and putting out her recordings.
A stint as singer and guitarist with Damien Jurado brought her to London where she turned up at Loose Records with her guitar. Used by now to the fine-dining courtship of major record companies, lunch with Loose supremo Tom Bridgewater involved searching a drawer for a cheese and ham sandwich. “I like it real,” says Andrews.
Loose released her self-produced Hon-
est Life in 2016, following it with May Your Kindness Remain. “If your money runs out/ And your good looks fade/ May your kind- ness remain,” it begins as a plea and ends as a passionate demand as Mark Howard’s pro- duction (Dylan, Williams, Waits) points Andrews’ roots/country sound towards soul and gospel – with the album hitting Nos.1 and 5 respectively in the UK’s Americana and Independent charts.
She says her family connection with roofers has meant she’s not afraid of heights. Just as well. The critical consensus suggests that Andrews is about to scale them. She tours the UK in December.
courtneymarieandrews.com F
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