Review: Courtney Marie Andrews exercises empathy on ‘May Your Kindness Remain’

There is something about the sweltering Arizona climate ⎯⎯ or maybe there’s just something in the water ⎯⎯ that fosters tear-soaked, heaven-bestowed vocalists, reared in humbled beginnings and torn through the wringer of life. Linda Ronstadt writes bemusedly in her 2013 memoir, “My mother used to joke that when she first met my father, he had a red convertible, a horse, a ranch, and a guitar. After she married him, all he had left was a guitar.” Born inside a “cloudburst,” as she remembers it, of the Tucson haze, Ronstadt mined sunny California folk-rock, dipped in dyes of traditional country, sentimental cinema and pop, throughout her legacy career. She might have lost her voice, tragically to Parkinson’s disease, but she remains the definitive benchmark for evocative, mountain-shredding bombast.

Courtney Marie Andrews, who also rises out of the Arizona dirt from a city called Phoenix, just over 100 miles away from Ronstadt’s birth place, cultivates a sprawling, thimble-pierced set with May Your Kindness Remain, a timely reminder never to discard our humanity. Trapped inside a pressure cooker of cultural, social and economic affairs, aggravated by fake news, photo shop hoaxes and disastrous policy changes, Andrews’ withering southern drawn and adept song craft offer a bit of solace, sun-baked from years of endless highway blacktops, grimy dive bars and couch hopping. She wraps her caramel-smattered voice around blazing torch ballads, often weighted with generous doses of misery. Even when she’s howling and ripping her heart from her chest, as she does so willingly and sacrificially on the title cut, which reads as the anthem of our generation, she reassures us bad times are temporary. Its timeless shimmer is owed to two things: Andrews’ raw, but loving, appetite to strike change through our nervous system and the well-oiled gospel application. “The richest of people aren’t rich with Elvis, cars or fame / No, they’re not rich with something that can be bought or arranged,” she sings, dissembling our bias about wealth and uncovering a heart that beats just as urgently as our own. She then points to something far more universally potent, “No, it’s kindness that makes them beautiful / And a kind heart don’t cost a dime / It’s a GIF that keeps giving for the rest of your life.”

“The tradition of songwriting is to be an empathizer for the world,” Andrews said on record this week, brandishing the album’s themes right onto the skin’s surface. “How do you dive deeper in a shallow river bed when the current pulls you further from what you should have said?” she asks on “Kindness of Strangers,” one of many pointed inquiries she dispatches over a blanket of blues choral singers and muddy guitar. She later answers those questions with a quiet command, nudging us forward to unlock a necessary revelation: angels in disguise really do walk among us. “You need the kindness of strangers,” she sings.

Andrews returns to that well frequently throughout the album’s runtime, often occupying unfamiliar territory and lives so far removed from her own; on “Border,” a heavenly, vein-split blues ditty, she imagines herself an immigrant to the United States, breaking territorial barriers in search of a better life. “When I get to the Land of the Brave, gonna buy me a hammer and move all day / Send it all back to the family, save a few bucks for that bow canteen / Stand outside that hardware store, don’t matter the job they need me for,” she charges, slinking into the stormy front-porch groove with ease.

“Is it the journey or the destination? Is this love or is this addiction? Circumstances are meant to be. What does that say about you and me?” she hollows out with “Took You Up,” a scorching piano ballad, shredded with gentle but incisive guitar stabs. She’s heavy-hearted and nearly numb to her surroundings, but it is compassion which pulls her back to her reality of stretching dollars between pay checks and being OK that things aren’t exactly OK. “This House”  sustains a somber glow, as she peaks between the cob webs, the laundry that’s never done, the paw tracks and boot prints to uncover “a whole lot of laughter and love,” she sings, almost mournfully. “This house, this house is our home,” she asserts and prompting herself that things aren’t as bad as they seem on the surface. With “Lift the Lonely from My Heart,” organ once again playing a key role, coolly shadow-dancing in the background, Andrews wrestles with lofty feelings of uncertainty and self-doubt. “Can you still see the good inside me? Or do you see a shell of who I was?” she implores, her lover being the sole proprietor of consolation in those fleeting moments.

Andrews draws significant, and quite obvious, comparisons to Ronstadt’s approach. Both possess a deeply thunderous instrument and are quite away of the full extent of that capacity, able to glide up onto syllables, even when they straddle the breaking point. But that’s the sweet spot, when they push the absolute limits of vocal ability to dig further into an unlocked emotional treasure. When Andrews swings by the well-tended, lush grapevines of “I’ve Hurt Worse,” it could very well have been Ronstadt’s aching “You Keep Me from Blowing Away” reincarnate or “Sorrow Lives Here” drawing near unto Andrews’ altar or even “Long, Long Time” comin’ back around again. “I love, honey, even when I’m feeling used / I love you, honey, you tell lies in the form of truths,” she swoons, the arrangement bruising, wilting and then turning over. “Even when you don’t come home, I like you, honey / Being with you is like being alone.”

The work of producer Mark Howard (Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson) deserves ample credit here, too (Andrews co-produced). Their haunting, sometimes visceral, production choices extend the emotional impact and allow the listener be even more traumatically involved with Andrews’ storytelling. Empathy has not been more important than it is right now in 2018, and Andrews encourages us all to take a step back, reassess and soldier forward, even when things are so dire, we lose site of our selves for a minute. It’ll all be worth it in the end.

Grade: 4.5 out of 5

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