Courtney Marie Andrews
Valentine is “a record in pursuit of love,” says Courtney Marie Andrews. But love, it turns out, “is a lot more than I gave it credit for,” she explains. “It’s built over years, it’s built with trust, with changes, it becomes something new and unrecognizable, the deeper you go.” Written at the junction of intense endings and beginnings in her life, Valentine demands more of those we love and reveals a stronger, wiser, and more clear-eyed Courtney Marie Andrews in the process. It is both lush and elemental, precise in its construction but rich with sonic and lyrical layers. In love and on Valentine, there is no quarter for empty gestures.
From her very first recordings, to her 2016’s breakthrough Honest Life, to 2020’s Grammy- nominated Old Flowers and her most recent Loose Future, Andrews has been celebrated as an artist who challenges herself, and who finds new interplays of Folk and Americana. “As a songwriter you can make the same record over and over again,” Andrews says, “and I’m not interested in that. I make records to stand alone and stand apart from each other.” Co-produced with Jerry Bernhardt and recorded almost entirely to tape, Valentine features complete in-studio performances, hinging on performance rather than perfection. “We thought a lot about Lee Hazlewood, about Big Star’s Third and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk” says Andrews, and that constellation of stars is apparent here. Valentine feels elegant, disciplined and balanced but never cold, always vulnerable and human.
“I was in one of the darkest periods of my life, and songs were the only way I could reckon with it,” says Andrews. “I felt cursed, and the only mental cure felt like songwriting and painting.” The near-death of a loved one loomed over everything, and while that person eventually recovered from both sickness and psychosis, Andrews was more sure that death was coming than recovery. Her grief was acute, volatile. The decline coincided with a new romance, but rather than lift her up, the two emotional poles seemed to bleed into each other to sow doubt, trouble, even obsession. “I was grappling with what I felt sure was death, and with the end of that relationship,” Andrews explains, “while I was also grappling with something new but quite unstable. Here was this new relationship evolving alongside the collapse of another.”
The result was what Andrews describes as limerence, but a somehow empowered limerence: consuming and fierce, piled high with insecurity and fantasy, and filling every inch of a space she feared was hollowing out. It was painful, she says, and not far off from the pain of grief. But through her own exploration of music and art, Andrews found a way to grow stronger inside this feeling. “I didn’t want to slink into my pain, I wanted to embrace it, own it.” The songs that emerged are devotional in their lyrics but defiant in their energy; it’s the very sound of a woman standing in her first wisdom.
Venue
Manchester M1 5WW
UK
54-56 Whitworth St
Manchester
M1 5WW
Manchester
UK
When01st January 1970 at 00:00
