Courtney Marie Andrews is used to being behind the scenes. The 26-year-old singer-songwriter, born in Arizona and currently living in Seattle, has played in backing bands for a who’s who of contemporary artists, including Damien Jurado and Jimmy Eat World. When she wasn’t on the road, she was busking or working in a bar.
“I spent six or seven years stumbling into backup-singing work for larger pop stars,” Andrews tells the Scene. “Before I got asked to be a backup singer — first it was for Jimmy Eat World — I thought that touring was like a Woody Guthrie life. I thought I was going to be hopping trains and going town to town for the rest of my life, maybe making, like, 50 bucks if I was lucky. That was all I knew. I’d done a lot of busking. It was a very vagabond, DIY punk kinda lifestyle. I didn’t even know what a publicist was or any of this mumbo-jumbo that you need to keep touring, to survive. [Jimmy Eat World] taught me a lot.”
It came as a bit of a shock to Andrews when her 2016 album Honest Life — her first full-length release since 2011’s On My Page — popped up on best-of lists far and wide, earning praise from the likes of NPR, The Guardian and Rolling Stone, as well as a guest spot on the BBC’s Later… With Jools Holland. Critics quickly drew comparisons between Andrews and songwriting giants like Joni Mitchell and Emmylou Harris, thanks both to her nimble singing voice and her preternatural gift for spinning stories of things that might seem ordinary into deeply resonant songs.
Honest Life is no misnomer. Andrews notes that the songs on this collection are the most pure incarnations of her process — a routine of absorbing what’s in her environment and filtering it back through her subconscious. For this record, that included heartbreak that struck during a tour through Europe and a stint tending bar at a rural dive in a small town outside of Seattle.
“I was backup singing for this guy, his name is Milow, who’s a famous pop star over in Belgium and Germany,” Andrews explains. “I was broken up with a week into that tour — it was like a two-month-long tour, too — so I started writing the record in Belgium in this town called Leuven. I just locked myself up in this Airbnb that they rented me, and all I could do was really write. Then when I moved back to Seattle, I finished up the record as a bartender.”
Each track offers a sense of hard-earned hindsight. “How Quickly Your Heart Mends” is told from the point of view of a woman who seems to be stuck in the bar, fending off drunken advances while she watches her ex have a high time with his new friends. In “Irene,” the singer tells a lovelorn companion to look to her strengths, in spite of the predicaments she finds herself in: “You are a magnet, Irene / Sometimes good people draw troublesome things.” Andrews attributes some of that intimate, conversational style to having time to reflect on her own sorrows, but also to the regulars she inevitably ended up counseling during her time behind the bar.
“It was [like] a sitcom,” says Andrews. “The same people came in every night, and on Halloween they all wore costumes. ‘How Quickly’ has elements of it, definitely, because I finished writing that song while working at the bar. ‘Irene’ has bits of it, too.”
Andrews says she’s already working on a new album, and she plans to finish it in Nashville over the next few weeks. She’s keeping a tight lid on details, but if her past work is any guide, it’ll be as rich and bold as a veteran bartender’s Old Fashioned. Cheers to that.
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