Small Acts of Life: A Conversation with Courtney Marie Andrews

By William Boyle

It’s a hard time to feel lucky, but good music can still make you feel that way. Lucky that you exist at the same time as an artist you admire. Lucky that her work has crossed your path. Courtney Marie Andrews is one such artist, and her new record, Old Flowers (out July 24 from Fat Possum), is such a record. In fact, since I discovered her album Honest Life in 2017, I’ve felt generally lucky to have her songs to lean on. They’ve soundtracked long drives from the Deep South back home to the East Coast, they’ve been with me in my headphones and on my speakers, and they’ve been a source of solace and strength in these years of madness. “You want it darker, we kill the flame,” Leonard Cohen sang on the title song of the record he released right before his death—and that’s the way it feels some days now, like all hope’s been extinguished. But the fact of the matter is that Andrews’s songs are flames, lights to guide us through the dark. They’re evocative, bittersweet, reflective, and haunting, and I’m so thankful for them.

William Boyle: Old Flowers has been a real lifesaver for me in these dark, scary days. It’s full of so much beauty and yearning. So many striking sensory details. Between recording it and releasing it, the world’s obviously changed drastically. The album very much seems like a memory piece, and I know I’m accessing my memories differently—with even more reverence, I guess—in quarantine. Has your perception of Old Flowers changed at all? The longing that’s present right from the start—I’m thinking of lines like “If I could go back, I’d pick you wildflowers, tie them in burlap string, tell you what you mean to me” on opener “Burlap String”—feels even more full-blossomed now with so much in our lives so distant and out of reach.

Courtney Marie Andrews: First of all, thank you. I am so pleased that my record could arrive as a comfort to you. I feel that even pre-pandemic, the view of our memories is ever-changing. Obviously, quarantine offers us so much solitude, and that process of perspective was sped up twofold. I’d say that quarantine has made me more nostalgic, overall, so I’ve been pondering the backstories of these songs, more than the songs themselves, as the writer. However, it did cross my mind that “Burlap String” took on a whole new level of grieving in my mind.

WB: You occasionally mention places by name in your songs, but it’s pretty rare. One thing that strikes me is how good you are at infusing your songs with a sense of place without getting overly specific. Your songs often feel like a place. I feel the West in these songs. How do you think about place when you’re writing? Did place have a big impact on the creation of Old Flowers?

CMA: I write the energy I feel around me, and more often than not, I get so inspired by writing in new places. Place is another tool in the toolbox as a writer. I was raised by hobby painters. There was a lot of visual art around me growing up, so I take that same approach to songwriting. I want to transport people somewhere when I write. When they arrive, I want to tell them a secret. Place means a lot to me.

WB: Your lovely poems feel cut from the same cloth as your songs, and the emotion in your singing voice comes through in your voice on the page. What tells you something’s a song or a poem? Is it just a feeling? Do songs ever become poems for you or vice versa? Or is it a totally different thing?

CMA: I can’t quite place my finger on why, but I have noticed that my poems come from this almost philosophical mindset, where I try to unveil some universal truth. Whereas my songs often come in the voice of a lover or friend. They feel like two different voices to me, even if they’re getting to the bottom of similar subjects. I’ve yet to crossbreed either. I will say, though, that when a song comes to me, it already has a melody, whereas my poems don’t.