COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS – VALENTINE: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 20 minutes ago
- 4 min read
COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS
Valentine (Thirty Tigers)
YOU KNOW, I’D LIKE TO BELIEVE this. I’d like to believe when Courtney Marie Andrews sings in Pendulum Swing – a kind of Buffalo Springfield fringe on a folk song jacket, which opens the album – “if I get what I want, gotta let the pendulum swing/Can’t be good for too long”, that it portends well. This is an album after all called Valentine, and love promised or love sought or even love found would presumably be the currency.
But really, the red flags are there from her opening words: “Man, I love a heart with one foot out the door/One that leaves me hungry, coming back for more”. Yeah, nah, that’s need driving sense. That’s hurt asking.
And if there is any doubt, the next track, Keeper, bares its vulnerabilities even as it makes its declaration in Andrews’ burnished cotton voice. “Would you hold my hand in public?/Would you wanna tell your friends?/Would you talk about forever?,” Andrews sings over a simple rhythm, her voice sometimes peaking higher, like she is trying to convince herself the questions don’t need to be asked, that they are rhetorical, and positive, like her declaration that, of course “Yes I would bring you home to mother/Even if she don’t approve” After all, she says in the chorus, “I’m a keeper of your heart/I’m a keeper of your secrets”, only to self-incriminate: “I keep it all together until it falls apart/I’m a keeper”.
She is, exactly. And there’s the rub. The work is hers, as is the responsibility and the cost. At the end of the “first side” of the record, in Little Picture Of A Butterfly, expectation has been revealed as fantasy, and a line punctured by a little detail, a nothing quite specific, captures it all: “Guess I should have known better/Guess I’m throwing out that sweater”.
Incidentally, Little Picture Of A Butterfly answers the question what would it sound like if Kris Kristofferson and Emmylou Harris merged and were backed by a British folk group, complete with flute (which reappears in Cons And Clowns). That’s Andrews on the flute too, her first instrument at school decades ago but not heard, I think, on her records before.
The context for this album – Andrews’ ninth overall but fourth since her career realignment/breakthrough with 2016’s Honest Life – is ostensibly the death of a close family friend who had been the responsible adult in her childhood, and the beginning and end of a relatively brief but unstable relationship. Ultimately however, the songs operate in a series of questions she has been putting to herself that spring from a truth she shares in the mid-80s Joni Mitchell weighted hum of Only The Best For You Baby, that “I will settle for your crumbs/The child in me needs your love.”
Who matters and why? Why have you been making the same mistakes? Who can fix it? And how?
The second side of the record is that interrogation, Andrews breaking down some of the luggage carried through from childhood and soon after that has influenced her decision making. Do she want to be part of the system, or is it too dangerous or just too hard when, as she puts in Outsider, “You give them your world, then they show you the door”?
“I wanna be an outsider/It’s to painful looking in,” she sings, slower and deeper like she’s offering an old school country ballad in a song that has space all around it. “Have fun with the insiders/The risk is too big”.
There are examples to follow, if you dare, or if you are happy to sacrifice some of yourself, as she shows in Everyone Wants To Feel Like You Do, which roughens up the guitars, emphasises the drums more and elevates the flutier vocals, taking that west coast sound from earlier further inland from any relaxed beachside properties.
“You're not sorry for the music/You're not sorry for what's felt/You're not sorry for the space you take/You're not sorry for yourself.” Is the upside, possibly, or at least the enviable side. But the flip is that “You're not sorry for existing/For the mess that you made/For bumping into someone/Likе me, that you hate.”
By album’s end, in the building-on-itself grandness of Hangman, its sonic signature nodding to Daniel Lanois’ atmospheric environments, Andrews hasn’t transformed herself – if only it was that easy and that quick to do! – but she knows what she is like now, and where those fault lines are. She offers that “Don’t wanna live playing hangman/Always asking for vowels”, and wants her putative-but-maybe-soon-punishing lover to “tell me now, tell me now, tell me now”.
And yet … as she was at the start of the album, Andrews is not closed off (if you’re being optimistic about life) or not wised up (if you’re not a believer), declaring with equal parts hope and regret, “I’ve loved you from the beginning”.
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APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Courtney Marie Andrews – Valentine