The dreamy voice, flowery dresses and elegant presence betray an inner roughneck within Courtney Marie Andrews. Standing a few inches over five feet, she may not look it, but Andrews is a fighter.
Her hardscrabble youth in 2000s Phoenix, where she honed her songwriting and performing skills, prepared her for what would become 20 years of near-constant movement. Andrews had long mythologized the nomadic musician experience and, since leaving home after high school with a guitar slung over her shoulder, that’s exactly what she’s been doing.
On the first day of her residency at the 2025 Iowa City Songwriters Festival, Andrews opened up about her early punk years, how walking fuels her songwriting and her newfound love of painting.
Get to know the seraphic songstress that John Prine, Nathaniel Rateliff, Madi Diaz and Jim Adkins (of Jimmy Eat World) have all clamored to work with, before her new album Valentine hits shelves Jan. 16.
Becoming Courtney Marie Andrews
Kids barely know what they want for dinner, let alone what they want to do for the rest of their lives. But for Courtney Marie Andrews, that path was illuminated the moment she wrote her first song.
Inspired by the claustrophobia of adolescence in the Arizona desert, and bands like Bikini Kill, Andrews and two girlfriends (all three guitarists) formed a feminist punk trio, Massacre in a Miniskirt, in middle school. Andrews says without drums, the band took a folkier, “Violent Femmes-y approach.”
“We all made a pact to go home and write songs,” recounted Andrews. “And I went home and I wrote a song and discovered that I needed — that I love to write songs.”
As a teenage solo artist, Andrews, who'd later find major mainstream success with her 2018 album May Your Kindness Remain, busked and busted her ass, becoming a respected voice in the Phoenix alternative scene. She found her first refuge in “skank pits” and other punk spaces in the southwestern capital city. Although her honey sweet vocals, poetic storytelling and graceful stage presence didn’t exactly scream punk, she felt right at home in the counterculture community.
“I had a boyfriend that I Elmer glued up his hair every day,” said Andrews of the time. “And the more I got into punk, the more I realized that I gravitated towards the songs of punk. The stuff that wasn’t so pure anger and no song. I loved when there was a message being sent.”
After graduating from the Arizona Conservatory of Arts and Academics, Andrews set out to become a full-time musician. Her most significant hurdle — the first initial in her Alma mater — was living in an area that was “not a particular cultural hub.”
In 2010, Andrews joined the already-rocking Mesa, Ariz. emo band Jimmy Eat World. Her voice can be heard in several songs on the band’s Jan. 1, 2010 release Invented, including a duet cover of Wilco/Feist's “You and I” with lead Jim Adkins. She even toured with the band for a few years as a vocalist and keyboardist before heading off to pursue solo work in Seattle (although she reconnected with the band for a song on their 2016 album, Integrity Blues).
Songwriting, Walking & Painting
If John Prine wants to duet, you do it.
That was Courtney Marie Andrews’ thinking when the late folk icon tapped her to be his tour opener in 2019. Same thing when he invited Andrews to make her Grand Ole Opry debut at his NYE spectacular, waiting in the wings with EmmyLou Harris and Iowa legend Iris Dement. And again when she flew down to the D.R. to perform at Prine’s eponymous All The Best Festival, for what would be one of his final live appearances.
“When I was a bartender, I sang ‘Angel From Montgomery’ every karaoke session,” said Andrews. “It was this wild experience where you hear the song for so long and then you finally get to sing it. It’s an American Songbook song, so to get to sing it with the guy who wrote it was really special.”
At the Iowa City Songwriters Festival, Andrews listed more of the classic American songwriters, or “heavy-hitters,” that inspire her storytelling, names such as Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. She’s also a big fan of 20th century luminaries Hoagie Carmichael and Johnny Mercer.
Crafting an enduring song, Andrews says, is every artist’s dream. Prine was a master at this, penning simple, but deeply resonant tunes to live on in absentia. Andrews’ romantic pursuit of the perfect song is why she’s given so much of herself to the world over the past 20 years.
Across roughly 10 albums, the earliest of which she wants nothing to do with, Andrews grew up, fell in and out of love, moved around and never ceased chasing brilliance.
“I think that every songwriter’s goal is to write the song, you know, the ‘You Are My Sunshine’ that just lives on for generations,” said Andrews.
But even the most inspired writers can hit a wall sometimes. To nurse the flame of her fire, Andrews has adopted a few methods of de-stressing. For one, she walks. Long walks to recenter mind and body have been a saving grace for Andrews, who values the time to unplug and connect with nature.
"I truly have derived so much from walking," said Andrews. "I try not to be distracted, I just walk. It's like my meditation. And when I'm in a really healthy creative process, I'm walking and creating. And those two are in conversation with each other. The time to just think is [an] integral part of creating."
Andrews also discovered a new passion in painting, which she picked up during the pandemic. Her palette, made even more apparent when arranged in gallery fashion on the second floor lobby of The Englert, is inseparable from the colors of the American southwest, relying heavily on red, orange, brown and yellow. Andrews' "Tears on Tables" exhibit resembles the frescos of Diego Rivera, but more whimsical and cartoonish — often depicting a tearful, Andrews-looking subject crying on tables at various stops along a grueling tour, such as a juke joint, dive bar, a Chinese restaurant and a Mexican spot.
Loose Future / Love Is A Dog That Bites When It's Scared
At ICSF, audience members packed the reading room on the second floor of Prairie Lights Books to hear Andrews read from her new paperback, Love Is A Dog That Bites When It's Scared. Although it’s Andrews’ second published collection, Love Is A Dog presented Andrews with her first real opportunity to read, pick apart and sell a book IRL, since COVID-19 derailed her 2021 debut, Old Monarch: Poems.
“Meg Ryan,” one of many explorations of love in all its facets, is one of Andrews’ favorite selections.
“It's a poem about how our generation of women were taught love through the lens of a Meg Ryan-type in a romantic comedy,” said Andrews. “That I'm a fool in this realm to believe that love is like what Meg Ryan taught us. It’s this begging of the universe… How do I actually operate in a world searching for love?”
Before the book launch in late 2025, Andrews had been keeping a low profile. She was letting her 2022 “pandemic record” Loose Future do most of the talking. Three years removed from the album’s release, one of its standout tracks, “Older Now,” was featured in the pilot of the HBO Max’s crime-thriller Task, which premiered the Sunday after ICSF.
The process of making Loose Future was unlike any of her prior records because, for once, her life was chill. Summer is money-making season for most musicians, especially guitar-wielding singer-songwriters. Consequently, since making a go at being a musician, Andrews’ summers have been anything but relaxed. That is, until 2020, when Andrews’ weeklong writing residency in Nantucket turned into three blissfully detached months in Cape Cod solitude, as all other programs canceled due to COVID-19.
“Pretty much up until that point, there had not been a year where I had not been gone for half a year,” said Andrews of her time away from home. “And so for the first time, I actually felt and embraced summer. I could feel the season change from spring to summer to fall. And I, like, truly sat with that and got to experience that — which you can only really feel if you're in one place or not gone too much.”
Andrews’ unexpected vacation spurred something in her, inspiring her to write a song a day for the duration of her stay. Ten of those songs became Loose Future.
Valentine
Andrews will soon add 10 new, original tunes to her deep catalog of love songs 10 when her album Valentine drops Friday, Jan. 16. The tracks on Valentine, which is her first studio album since Loose Future, were written over the course of two years.
Andrews has teased her upcoming album with three singles: “Keeper,” "Cons & Clowns” and “Little Picture of a Butterfly,” with moody music videos for the first two and a live, full band recording of the latter (featuring Andrews on flute).
