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Your support makes all the difference.“You are a magnet, Irene, sometimes good people draw troublesome things” is the sort of deliciously evocative lyric that marks Courtney Marie Andrews out from her alt-country contemporaries.
That and the long-haired singer’s astonishing, pristine voice; sometimes her voice feels too powerful for this intimate venue, a bit like Lady Castafiore from Tintin.
The 26-year-old singer-songwriter from Phoenix, Arizona, (she’s now resident outside Seattle) possesses an old head on young shoulders, fashioning tangy, tangible vignettes that recall Southern author Flannery O’Connor and country-rocker Jason Isbell. Tonight, the former Washington State barmaid performs her biggest London show to date with a perky four-piece band and she’s understandably less garrulous than when solo, where she always sparkles.
Andrews’s in-between chat is kept to a minimum, save for an admission that one new song is about her once incarcerated uncle (“He would send me paintings from prison”), that she’s sweltering (“It feels like home in here, it’s so hot”) in this cosy, David Lynch-like venue (the stage has a red curtain backdrop reminiscent of Blue Velvet) and a dig at Donald Trump’s leadership (“It’s been an interesting time to be from America and it’s been painful”).
The charming performer boldly unleashes a wealth of new material, including a song (“Buffalo”) “about the gentrification of American cities” and another that focuses on karaoke and frozen dinners (who hasn’t been there?).
However, the high points are from her debut (she actually self-produced five albums before it) record Honest Life, most notably the lilting, coming-of-age “Rookie Dreaming”, the poignant “How Quickly Your Heart Mends” (on which she pleads “The jukebox is playing a sad country song/ For all the ugly Americans”) and the rip-roaring, standout number “Irene”. All delivered in a voice that recalls the Laurel Canyon scene of the 1970s, Linda Thompson, Emmylou Harris and (even) Janis Joplin. It’s a heady mix.
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