Courtney Marie Andrews: Honest Life

Courtney Marie Andrews
Honest Life
(Mama Bird Recording Co.)
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

The first thing that strikes you about Courtney Marie Andrews’ music is her voice. Sweet, supple and strong, it’s a potent, powerful mix of Emmylou Harris, Tift Merritt, Linda Ronstadt and Linda Thompson. Pure, wholesome and clear, she injects instant authenticity into anything those vocal chords are wrapped around. When she sings on the title track “All I’ve ever wanted was an honest life/ to be the person that I really am inside” there’s no doubt she believes and lives every word. It’s no surprise that Honest Life is the name she chose for her third solo album.

Andrews matches her sparkling voice with honeyed, generally somber folk/country that, when matched with often melancholy lyrics, will give you shivers. One glance at songs titled “Table for One,” “Let the Good One Go,” and “How Quickly Your Heart Mends,” (the latter sung to a guy who has seemingly quickly forgotten their relationship [“Leave with your new friends/how quickly your heart mends”] as she recounts with devastating honesty), tells the story. Every track has at least one couplet you’ll return to such as on “15 Highway Lines” when Andrews laments “I’m like a tethered ball you can never catch/ You were my only friend.”    

Support by sparse but not stark backing, make these ballads glow and shine with a low key luster. A few lively selections such as “Irene,” the disc’s first single where Andrews warns her friend not to fall in love with herself, keep the vibe from getting too wrapped up in the somber if not quite gloomy groove the singer-songwriter clearly favors. But there’s no sense obscuring Andrews’ luscious voice behind a rock band, something she, as the album’s sole producer, realizes. Still, a few more upbeat tracks would help maintain a balance which tilts heavily towards the more sorrowful sounds that reflect her similarly emotive concepts.      

The grainy, subdued cover photo perfectly mirrors the similarly restrained music inside Honest Life. It, along with the album’s title, represents an unflinchingly frank and authentic reflection of Courtney Marie Andrews’ approach to her career and art contained inside.