Band of the Week: Courtney Marie Andrews
By Gwendolyn Elliott January 9, 2017
With so much happening in Seattle’s bustling music scene these days, how do you even know where to start? Allow the highly trained culture curators of Seattlemag.com to help with Band of the Week. This week, we catch up with singer/songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews, a vocalist with a songbird set of pipes that can be heard backing up everyone from Damien Jurado to Jimmy Eat World. She’s steadily been making a name for herself with a series of her own releases, and her latest LP, Honest Life, topped 2016 year end lists from Rolling Stone Country to KEXP, lauded for its honest twang and Andrews’ lyrical vocals that capture a throwback Laurel Canyon sound. She performs at the Tractor this Sunday with Joe Pug.
In three sentences, tell how you came to music. First I loved the musical Annie, and wanted to be a singing orphan. Then I joined a feminist punk band as a teenager, and out of necessity became the songwriter. I’ve been singing and songwriting ever since.
Tell us about the new project. I like to think of Honest Life as a romanctic travelogue. Honest Life is a journey home. Its songs are about trying to get back to your roots, and pining for the familiar. I’ve spent most of my adulthood on the road, and this album’s themes deal with coming of age, and coming to terms with that.
When writing these songs, I was living abroad in Belgium, while singing backup for an artist. I had a lot of space and time for self reflection, and the songs for this record poured out. They needed to happen.
What does being an artist/musician/band in Seattle mean to you? As long as I’m creating and progressing my craft, it doesn’t matter where I am. Seattle is beautiful and has been my my home for several years now, but being there doesn’t change the fact that I try and create songs on a daily basis. I’m originally from Phoenix, Arizona and when I first moved to the Northwest I was passionately inspired by how different it was than my hometown. Living in Seattle as an artist means taking advantage of the cloudy, wet winters, to write and explore your craft.
What BIG question should we ask, and what’s the answer? Question: What is love? Answer: Baby, don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me, no more.
What’s next? Gonna keep on truckin,’ until I die. Write, play, sing, travel.
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