Courtney Marie Andrews - Valentine
★★★★
THIRTY TIGERS.
Courtney Marie Andrews has always sung with wisdom beyond her years. She broke through a decade ago, exploring the shortcomings of the world with a wit that lent her Americana a millennial edge. She was only 25 then, but Honest Life was her seventh full-length and followed previous lives as preteen karaoke singer in Arizona honky tonks, frontwoman of riot grrls Massacre In A Mini Skirt and keyboardist/backing-vocalist with emo-rockers Jimmy Eat World. She’d been around the block enough times to know what her truth was, and how to sing it so it resonated.
Since then, she’s serenaded America’s better side as the nation became increasingly polarized (2018’s Let Your Kindness Remain), essayed a brutal breakup with cinematic detail (2020’s Old Flowers) and extended her gifts to pop without sacrificing her integrity (2022’s Loose Future). Her eleventh album, Valentine, was written amid the turmoil of a loved one’s illness and the uncertainty of a new relationship. With her characteristic alchemic touch, however, it synthesises this turbulence into music that’s moving, beautiful and uplifting.
Musically, it’s inspired by albums that almost ended careers: Big Star’s haunted Third/Sister Lovers and Fleetwood Mac’s genius folly Tusk. And while there’s nothing here that couldn’t slip onto the Radio Two playlist, this is MOR of subtle daring and innovation. The desolate Little Pictures Of A Butterfly uses new-age synth and jazz flute to evoke a post-breakup fugue state. Outsider invests the ABBA-worthy melancholy of its melody in the sort of exquisitely dreamy ambience Lindsey Buckingham used to regularly conjure for Stevie Nicks. Keeper and Only The Best, meanwhile, introduce harmonies recalling jazz-era Joni.
Her plumbing of emotional depths can risk sentimentality or being lachrymose, but her unguarded honesty is disarming and affectingly real, whether the loneliness of Best Friend (longing for “someone to laugh with at bad jokes only we get”) or the existential alienation of Outsider (“How could I be an insider / when I don’t fit in?”). She still holds her world to standards it rarely meets: Cons & Clowns narrows its eyes upon the “bad people who will tear you down”, while Magic Touch finds her reasoning that “Los Angeles is such a drag … no drugs or money could fill this void inside me”.
But there’s a sturdiness to Andrews’ worldview: a hopefulness that finds her advising the subject of Cons & Clowns, “Don’t make yourself small, baby – take up space”, a sense of romance that perceives the same place that “reeks of beer and piss” might also be freighted with “good times”. This is the redemption her music promises: Courtney Marie Andrews won’t sugarcoat the chips being down, but her humour and honesty guarantee there’s no-one you’d rather have in your corner.
Valentine is out January 16 on Thirty Tigers.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade
Tracklisting:
PENDULUM SWING KEEPER
CONS & CLOWNS
MAGIC TOUCH
LITTLE PICTURE OF A BUTTERFLY
OUTSIDER
EVERYONE WANTS TO FEEL LIKE YOU DO
ONLY THE BEST FOR BABY
BEST FRIEND
HANGMAN
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