Nearly two decades into her career, Courtney Marie Andrews remains a troubadour of singular sincerity, more interested in listening to the world than begging the world to listen. She has cultivated a multi-disciplinary catalog of despair, devotion, and delicate wonder: songs that ache with intensity, poems about love and eucalyptus, paintings of women crying onto tables. At a time when artists increasingly tailor their hooks for TikTok algorithms and retrofit their images to micro-trends, she isn’t vulnerable because it sells but because it’s her modus operandi. This open-heartedness can come at a cost: Andrews is hardly naive, but her heartfelt, retro songs, which lack a protective layer of cynicism, have often betrayed the pains of overtrusting. As she puts it in a poem from her 2021 collection Old Monarch: “Is it enough to be/warm with intention?” Valentine, Andrews’ ninth LP, offers a conditional yes—not by pining for anyone in particular, but by fiercely defending the right to pine.
Over the years, Andrews has garnered comparisons to fellow Arizona native Linda Ronstadt for her rich, clear tone, which can modulate from quivering vibrato to crystalline belt on a dime. From the first piercing high of opening track “Pendulum Swing,” Andrews commands her dynamic voice across Valentine, swinging into phrases with the grace and gravity of a trapeze artist. Much of Andrews’ previous album, 2022’s Loose Future, was mild and loping; on Valentine, her voice reverts to the arresting quality of earlier releases like 2018’s May Your Kindness Remain. “I am proudly wounded,” she admits, and whether she’s letting out a haunted bleat on “Keeper” or singing with feisty, spurned brightness on the country call-out “Everybody Wants to Feel Like You Do,” it’s easy to believe she’s telling the truth.
Valentine is less a heartbreak record than a suite of songs about the weight of love with no place to land. Andrews loves “a heart with one foot out the door,” but she yearns for someone “to tell my deepest thoughts to,” someone who would “bring me home to mother.” Searching synths heighten the drama on the album’s slower tracks, to mixed effect: “Outsider,” an ’80s-style croon-fest, is as brooding as last call at the honky-tonk, while the plea for companionship in “Best Friend” lands just a touch corny. Andrews is gifted at writing fresh, catchy hooks, and “Only the Best for Baby,” anchored by an open-D ostinato, proves she can write riffs just as satisfying as her vocal melodies. Because she can sound mournful even on upbeat songs, ballads tend to slip into melodrama. But when Andrews finds solid grooves to express her bittersweet optimism, Valentine rocks.
Andrews may sing about loneliness, but she conjures a communal sound: lush harmonies, punchy background vocals, twinkling high-strung guitars, and a suite of vintage synths like the Farfisa and the Solina create a sound that sounds far larger than the trio who crafted it (Andrews, alongside co-producer Jerry Bernhardt, and Grizzly Bear drummer Chris Bear). The production is blissful, flowing from the same mystical spring as recent records from Madison Cunningham and Hannah Cohen. On “Magic Touch,” you can hear the influence of Lee Hazlewood in the witchy, minor-key swell of the chorus; on “Little Picture of a Butterfly,” a driving, theatrical build-up collapses into an ambient outro, punctuated by fluttering high-pitched flutes, a delightful flourish made even more delightful when you learn it’s Andrews herself, playing for the first time since fifth grade.
Valentine sometimes lacks the concrete, colorful descriptions that once enriched Andrews’ songwriting with a sense of place. On past releases, she has evoked the “Red Roof Inn” and the “Raging River Bar,” speaking directly to “Michael” or “Jerry” or “the prince of Thailand.” On Valentine, it’s a rarer treat to encounter Andrews “waiting by this Hollywood pool like a sad bird of paradise,” “driving around in a red Corvette,” or receiving a father’s blessing “in a parked car with the engine on.” Often, she is most present in metaphors, while the flesh-and-blood Andrews grows more elusive than we’ve come to expect. Perhaps her form of self-preservation is to document the process of learning more than sharing the details. On Valentine, she seems ready to offer more of herself—but she’s guarding herself more tightly, too.
