Globe Hall Presents Courtney Marie Andrews with Aubory Bugg on Tuesday, April 14th.
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.”
Andrews is, and has always been, unafraid to say the thing. Her songs are challenging but compassionate, they welcome us in but push us to venture out. And this, in the end, may do the most to explain Valentine as both a theme and title. Andrews rejects the objectification of love, the love filled with gestures and objects instead of trust, mess, and growth. In doing so, she delivers her most beautiful and loving album to date.
