Heart-worn Highways
“IPEED on the side of the road all the way home, and wore gloves to get gas,” says Courtney Marie Andrews. The 29-year-old singer-songwriter has recently returned to her home in Nashville from a week-long furlough in Upstate New York. The cross-country drive – amid the Coronavirus outbreak in America – felt precarious. “I was trying to be as cautious as possible, not only for my safety but for the safety of others,” she says.
For one week, Andrews, Swedish singer-songwriter Kristian Matsson (aka The Tallest Man On Earth), singer-songwriter and producer Sam Evian and singer-songwriter Hannah Cohen gathered together as the United States began to lock down. Matsson and Andrews had just begun an American tour when, on March 13, amid increasing fear and uncertainty as the virus spread across the country – hitting Washington state, New York and California the hardest – the whole thing was cancelled. “We knew Sam lived in the woods and we decided that woods is exactly where we wanted to be,” she says. “The original intention was to continue on there. But with New York in the state that it was, for everybody’s safety, we decided to leave early.”
The quartet broadcast a charmingly unrehearsed live performance over YouTube and recorded enough tracks to make a record. “We had joked over text that this could be our quarantine record and I was like, ‘Maybe we should just make one and make the most of it.’” As of now, though, there are no plans to release it anytime soon. “It was so last-minute, we haven’t really thought about it,” she says.
Back at home, Andrews is at ease in her living room, its sage green walls adorned with her, her eighth full-length record as a solo artist, a remarkable feat for a songwriter who’s not yet 30 years old. Written in 2019 amid the collapse of a nine-year relationship – one that spanned the entirety of Andrews’ twenties – was written in chosen solitude. She sequestered in a small Arizona mining town called Bisbee, about three hours south from where she grew up in Phoenix, as well as in Lisbon, Portugal and Nashville. “A big part of last year was my soul journey,” she says. “When you’re with somebody for that long, you can feel like a part of you is missing.”
