Courtney Marie Andrews Artistfacts

November 7, 1990
Courtney Marie Andrews grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. She was raised by her mother, a Target employee who brought her up on her own in a working-class neighborhood where music spilled in through the windows.

"Not much music was played at my house," she told Handstamp. "My mom was into country radio and that sort of thing. We lived in a neighborhood in Phoenix, where there would be Mariachi blasting from the houses around us. Those were my first memories of music."
Andrews made her performing debut at 5 years old in the Gold Dust Elementary School talent show.
Before she ever played folk, Courtney Marie Andrews was a punk. Inspired by the claustrophobia of adolescence in the Arizona desert, and by feminist icons like Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, she and two girlfriends formed a middle-school punk trio called Massacre in a Miniskirt. All three played guitar - they didn't have a drummer. "It was a giant catalyst for me to write songs," she told Folk and Tumble.
Andrews left home at 16 with only an acoustic guitar and a determination to make music her life. Her first two years were spent busking. "I would honestly say they were the most carefree moments of my life," she told The Independent. "Every day it felt like a day off and busking didn't feel like work at all."

Andrews went on to tour and record as a backing vocalist and session guitarist with various acts.
Her breakthrough into the mainstream came via an unlikely route - joining Arizona emo band Jimmy Eat World. In September 2009, frontman Jim Adkins invited her to sing on a live cover of the Wilco/Feist song "You And I." She proceeded to contribute backing vocals to five songs on the band's 2010 album Invented, including the single "Coffee and Cigarettes," and toured with the band as keyboardist and backing vocalist through 2010 and 2011.
Andrews largely wrote her 2016 album Honest Life, the record that made her name, during a four-month stay in Belgium when she felt hugely homesick. She completed the writing after returning to the US and taking a bartending job at a tavern near Seattle, where conversations with the regulars helped her identify the unifying themes of the cycle of life that run through the record. It was released by Mama Bird Recording Co. and Loose Music; Andrews subsequently signed to Fat Possum.
One of the highlights of Andrews' career was her friendship and collaboration with John Prine. She performed with him in 2019 - joining Nathaniel Rateliff for a stunning cover of "Summer's End" - and took part in a 2020 NPR Tiny Desk tribute to Prine alongside Margo Price, Brandy Clark, and others following his death from COVID-19.
Andrews is also a poet and a painter, and she considers visual art and music as parallel storytelling tools. Creating a series of paintings alongside writing her 2026 album Valentine helped her unlock new ways of expressing the same experiences.

"What was really beautiful about discovering art and poetry as a means of expression is that there are now multiple ways to tell a story," Andrews told The Creative Independent. "Once I come back to writing after painting, I can tell a new story because I've found multiple ways to tell it."
Valentine marked a new sonic frontier for Andrews, who plays a large range of instruments across the record including flute, Yamaha CS-60, mellotron, flutter piano, prepared piano, Roland RS09, and high-strung guitars - besides her usual acoustic and electric guitar. Picking up the flute was a return to an instrument she hadn't played since fifth grade. "I dove in like most things in my life that way," she told The Creative Independent, "not being afraid to make bad art."

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