Courtney Marie Andrews – Old Flowers
Loose / Fat Possum Records – 24 July 2020
On Old Flowers, the latest offering from Courtney Marie Andrews, the instrumentation is intimate and sparse, reflecting songs that document the end of a nine-year relationship and the process of recovery. As she puts it, it’s “about loving and caring for the person you know you can’t be with. It’s about being afraid to be vulnerable after you’ve been hurt. It’s about a woman who is alone, but okay with that if it means truth“.
With just herself on piano and guitar, Andrews is joined by Big Thief’s James Krivchenia on drums, Matthew Davidson variously on keys, bass and pedal steel with Andrew Sarlo (also producing) playing bass on a couple of tracks.
A slow waltzer, opener Burlap String reflects with regret as she sings how “In a small West Coast town/There’s a family and a house/Where the memories of us belong” and that “If I could go back now/I’d pick you wildflowers/Tie them in burlap string/Tell you what you mean to me” because “there’s no replacing someone like you“, before concluding that “I’ve grown cautious, I’ve grown up/I’m a skeptic of love“.
With Andrews on piano, there’s an almost church-like feel to the equally slow-paced Guilty. The song addresses the conflicted emotions entangled in letting go and starting again while still haunted by ghosts of an old love (“I have fallen in love with you/I can’t eat, no I can’t sleep/There is nothing in this world I can do/When I wake up in the morning next to him“), trying to put the past behind her (“I am thankful for the time we shared“) but feeling guilty of emotional betrayal.
Opening with a barely audible strummed guitar that reflects the cautiousness of the lyric, If I Told concerns the hesitancy of opening yourself up to your new lover (“What would you say, if I told you/You’re my last thought at the end of each night?/Would you believe me/or would you even reply?“), of compromising to try and make it work (“I am a loner, I am stubborn/Can you handle this world I live in? I know I can’t change, but for you, I’d compromise/I’d be on your side if you’d be on mine“), but also of submitting to the ineffability of fate (“Is it in the stars? Or some age old truth? Why did the universe draw me to you?“).
Another piano ballad, Together Or Alone again returns to the first moment when the spark ignites (“When we first met, your hair was in your eyes/Didn’t believe a word you said, but I loved those pretty lies“), seen through the blurred perspectives of hindsight and hope (“In some other lifetime, would you pick me out again? Would I have chosen to stay and see us through until the end?“. Caught in the limbo between having let go and not yet finding a mooring, she reflects “for a moment in time I know what we had was real/You stay with me, no you never really go/in the bars out on Broadway, in the chords of this piano/What a God damn mess, fate is such a joke“, but trusting that time will ease the hurt and that “one day we’ll be laughing, together or alone“.
When relationships fall apart, there’s always a tendency to think you’ll never be able to love again and that’s what underpins the late-night despair of the plangent piano and military snare flourishes of Carnival Dream with its “I may never let love in again” refrain as she speaks of spending days “trying … to forget/How sweet life was when we first met” and restless nights with dreams of searching for but never finding her lover, waking up to just memories.
Opening with a powerful piano chord, the title track, however, is a moment of epiphany, the realisation that “You can’t water old flowers” and the affirmation that “I’m not your object to break/You can’t hold me like I’m yours“. It’s that moment when you finally see yourself as your own person, not in relation to someone else as she tells his memory “please go home now/I can sleep on my own. I’m on my own now – but I don’t feel alone.”
It’s appropriately followed by the muted rumbling drums and bass of Break The Spell, a call to be released that echoes the sentiments of Motown classic You Keep Me Hanging On when “tonight you say you want me, tomorrow change your mind“.
One of the relatively more uptempo tracks, her voice finally soaring, It Must Be Someone Else’s Fault seems to be about denial “Must be someone else’s heart who tainted mine/No, I cannot be to blame for the story of this pain“, that it somehow runs in the genetic makeup (“Feels like I’ve gone crazy/Like the women in my family usually do”) and that “I’ve gone bad, but the world is good“, but the words really need to be heard through the lens of mocking irony.
It ends on notes of acceptance and liberation, first up being the plaintive, hymnal-like weeping celeste and piano ballad How You Get Hurt, an acknowledgement that if you let your guard down, you can get hurt, but perhaps getting hurt when it doesn’t work out is better than never giving it a chance.
Then, with Andrews on Wurlitzer, comes the literal and metaphorical closer, Ships In The Night, a sort of variation on Ben Glover’s benediction Kindness (complete with a slight Celtic shading), with its blessing of “Hope you eased on the drinking, hope you laugh, hope you care/Hope your days are even better than the ones that we shared/And I hope that you find love, settle down somewhere new/And I hope that this world sees who I see in you” and the acceptance that “I know we felt the same way, but the timing wasn’t right“, with its final line “I’m sending you my love and nothing more“.
More intimate and with a less dynamic range than her past two albums perhaps, but unquestionably one of her best, one which, in its journey from wreckage to rebirth, it reaches deep into what Yeats termed the rag and bone shop of the heart, and finds treasure within.
Pre-order Old Flowers: https://cma.lnk.to/OldFlowersPR