Songfacts®:

• Courtney Marie Andrews' eighth solo album, Old Flowers, chronicles the heartbreaking end of a 9-year relationship - one that spanned the entirety of Andrews' 20s - and learning to be alone again.
• Andrews spent some time writing in Portugal in the summer of 2019 and ended up penning many of the Old Flowers tracks there. The title song came to her serendipitously in Lisbon after making friends with a local poet at a fado café open mic. They hung out until about 4 a.m. one night and he recited a poem to her in Portuguese. It struck a chord in Andrews, even though she didn't understand what the man was saying, so she asked him to translate the title of into English.
  
  "He looked at me and went, 'I don't know if this is a very good translation, but it kind of means old flowers,'" she recalled to Uncut magazine. "And I was just like, that's it. That's my album.'"
• Andrews went back to her Airbnb and wrote the song, which uses old flowers as a poignant metaphor for a love uncared for coming to an end.
  
  You can't water old flowers
  
  "Those words made so much sense to me," the Arizona singer-songwriter told Uncut. "It's how love can become. If you don't nurture it, you can't revive it."
• Andrews recorded the Old Flowers album in Los Angeles with Andrew Sarlo, who's produced records by Big Thief, among others.
• While making Old Flowers, Andrews deliberately changed her vocal approach from the fuller, more expansive style she used on her 2018 May Your Kindness Remain album. "With May Your Kindness Remain I got very boisterous," she explained to Uncut magazine. "But with Old Flowers I really wanted it to be a close conversation."
  
  That meant singing more softly and with restraint, drawing listeners into the album's bruised, deeply personal narratives.
• Andrews recorded Old Flowers in a Los Angeles warehouse with sweeping windows overlooking downtown, as the sun rose and set over the skyline. "We had candles lit everywhere," she told Uncut. "That was one of the best feeling records to record."