At just 16 years old, Courtney Marie Andrews left home in Arizona for her first tour. She traveled up and down the West Coast, busking and playing any bars or cafés that would have her. Soon after, she took a Greyhound bus four nights straight from Phoenix to New York to do the same on the East Coast. For a decade or so since, Courtney’s been a session and backup singer and guitarist for nearly 40 artists, from Jimmy Eat World to Damien Jurado. She never stopped writing her own material, though. Picking up admirers like Jurado and Ryan Adams along the way, she has quietly earned a reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter.

With plans to settle down for a bit and focus on her own songs, Courtney moved to the Northwest in 2011 to record her last full-length record On My Page. However, the record had hardly been released before she was on the road again performing other artists’ songs, eventually leading her overseas to play guitar and sing with Belgian star Milow. At the tour’s end, though, the other session players joined her to record her 2014 EP Leuven Letters in one take.

It was during this time that Courtney also wrote many of the songs on Honest Life. She found herself realising the impact of growing up on the road and this constant reconciling between her and other’s art and identity.

Courtney produced the entire record herself at Litho Studios in Seattle with recording engineer Floyd Reitsma. Honest Life will be available on 180g turquoise LP, CD and digitally on 20th January 2017.

Twain

Twain is the solo project of Mt. (Mat) Davidson, a tender and evocative singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He has previously worked with the likes of The Low Anthem, The Deslondes and Spirit Family Reunion. Mt. Davidson, originally from Virginia has started in the mids-2000s to write and self-record under the name Twain. His first attempts were self-released song collections In 2010 he put out , Love Is All Around, and it’s his first attempt to bring in those people who still form the Twain band on the newest album: Ken Woodard on basses, Peter Pezzimenti on drums, plus soundengineer as band member Adrian Olson (Natalie Prass, Matthew E. White, Flo Morrissey, Foxygen) .