Courtney Marie Andrews: Completing hat-trick of Pocklington appearances on May 21. Picture: Wyndham Garnett
VALENTINE’S Day falls on May 21 at All Saints Church, Pocklington, when Phoenix, Arizona singer, songwriter, poet, musician and artist Courtney Marie Andrews promotes her new album.
“Valentine is a record in pursuit of love,” says Grammy nominee Courtney Marie, 35. Love, however is “a lot more than I gave it credit for. It’s built over years, it’s built with trust; with changes, it becomes something new and unrecognizable, the deeper you go”.
Released in January, Valentine is her most sonically explorative record: she plays flute, high-strung guitars and myriad synths, while drawing heavy inspiration from her art outside music.
Courtney Marie is a vivid poet and an accomplished painter, and across Valentine you can feel these disciplines interwoven, everything feeding the beauty and clarity of everything else.
Written at the junction of intense endings and beginnings in her life, Valentine demands more of those we love and reveals a stronger, wiser and more clear-eyed Courtney Marie in the process. The album is both lush and elemental, precise in its construction but rich with sonic and lyrical layers. In love and on Valentine, there is no quarter for empty gestures.
From her first recordings in 2008 to 2016’s breakthrough, Honest Life, 2020’s Grammy-nominated Old Flowers to her ninth studio album, Loose Future, Courtney Marie has challenged herself, finding new interplays of folk and Americana.
“As a songwriter, you can make the same record over and over again, and I’m not interested in that,” she says. “I make records to stand alone and stand apart from each other.”
Co-produced with Jerry Bernhardt and recorded almost entirely to tape, Valentine features complete in-studio performances. “We thought a lot about Lee Hazlewood, about Big Star’s Third and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk,” says Courtney Marie.
“I was in one of the darkest periods of my life, and songs were the only way I could reckon with it. I felt cursed, and the only mental cure felt like songwriting and painting.”
The near-death of a loved one loomed over everything, and while that person eventually recovered from both sickness and psychosis, Courtney Marie was more sure that death was coming, rather than recovery.
Her grief was acute, volatile. The decline coincided with a new romance, but rather than lift her up, the two emotional poles seemed to bleed into each other to sow doubt, trouble, even obsession.
“I was grappling with what I felt sure was death, and with the end of that relationship, while I was also grappling with something new but quite unstable,” she says. “Here was this new relationship evolving alongside the collapse of another.”
The result was a feeling of “limerence, but a somehow empowered limerence,” she says: consuming and fierce, piled high with insecurity and fantasy, and filling every inch of a space she feared was hollowing out.
The poster artwork for Courtney Marie Andrews’ All Saints Church concert in Pocklington
It was painful, she says, and not far off from the pain of grief, but through her own exploration of music and art, Courtney Marie found a way to grow stronger inside this feeling. “I didn’t want to slink into my pain; I wanted to embrace it, own it,” she explains.
The songs that emerged are devotional in their lyrics but defiant in their energy: a high-wire balance that permeates Valentine, typified by lead single Everyone Wants To Feel Like You Do with its indictment of the type of man who feels he can move through the world whatever way he wants without consequence.
Here, Courtney Marie’s singing is classic honey-and-vinegar, sounding sweet but carrying a sting. “It’s this funny double-edged thing because you do want to feel like that person, but you’re not sure if you should, because it’s a person so disconnected, without a care in the world or a care for other people,” she says.
“I played the guitar solo like I didn’t care in that song. I thought ‘I’m just gonna play it like I don’t give a s**t what anyone else is doing.’”
Little Picture Of A Butterfly is another example, one where the reclamation of power in the lyrics (“Soulmates what a pretty thought/but either you do, or you do not”) mirrors the same in the music. “It’s such a trad song in a lot of ways but we added flute, we added organ and all these Brian Wilson harmonies,” she says.
Keeper is the only co-written song on Valentine, one whose back story reads like a short film. “I was at dinner with a dear friend [singer-songwriter Kate York] , and I was really going through it. I asked her if I’m a keeper, and we both just started crying,” recalls Courtney Marie. “We wrote the song then and there, line by line over dinner. I went home and put a melody over it after.”
As she releases her tenth studio set, only now is she appreciating the centrality of her power as a singer. “Historically my favourite artists weren’t looked at as singers. They were looked at as writers,” she says. “And I sort of dissociated myself from singing; I chose to use it when it behoved me, but I wasn’t connected with it.”
However, the more interdisciplinary her work became, the more that belief seemed to dissolve. “Singing is another stroke. The most direct line to your heart. Everything is colour, texture. The way you sing can change everything, for both you and the people listening,” she says.
In rejecting the objectification of love, the love filled with gestures and objects instead of trust, mess, and growth, Courtney Marie has delivered her most beautiful and loving album to date.
Come May 21, at 7.30pm, Courtney Marie will be completing a hat-trick of Pocklington appearances. She had been booked to follow up her December 2018 debut at Pocklington Arts Centre on June 17 2020, but the pandemic restrictions put paid to that show and its rearranged date of June 17 2021. Third time lucky, she finally returned on June 19 2022.
Promoted by Hurricane Promotions, tickets for Courtney Marie’s Valentine’s night in Pock are on sale at £25 via courtneymarieandrews.com.
Question: What is “limerence”?
Answer: The involuntary state of intense romantic infatuation, obsession and emotional dependency on another person (the “limerent object”). The term was coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in 1979, defining a feeling that differs from love by being focused primarily on the uncertainty of reciprocation, often causing obsessive thinking, idealisation and emotional volatility, ranging from ecstasy to despair.