Arms Wide Open: A conversation with Courtney Marie Andrews
The day I speak with Courtney Marie Andrews, in a shiny hotel lobby on the wild Welsh coast, as Autumn bleeds into Winter, is the same day that her new album, Valentine, is announced to the world.
In the photograph that accompanies the news, Courtney is seen on a cliff-top, the sea a blurred expanse somewhere distant and beyond. The album's cover shot presents a similar scene, the light catching her face in the foreground, wind holding her hair, everything behind her in shadow. Earlier that day, we’d both peeled away from the festival we were at to explore the cliffs at the end of the road, wandering the trails that run along the breathtaking stretch of Welsh coastline where craggy rocks meet the swelling green seas below.
I listened to the album in my headphones as I first walked and then perched on the edge, looking out across to Ireland, into the huge sky. I listened again a little later as I towelled myself off after I swam in the bracing Irish sea, something I’ve been doing a lot lately to try and alleviate various weights, watched by strangers from the cliffs above. I am already carrying these songs with me.
Later that night Courtney would perform in a small church down the hill. In the quiet moments you could hear the wind and rain tapping out their own sounds on the old walls. Some of her new songs would be sung into that same night, others would remain a secret for now. In the time since that day the seasons have changed, light has shifted. The songs that make up the album have changed too, taking on new shapes as they drift into people’s lives, finding new homes.
Valentine, Andrews’ ninth full-length collection, and the follow-up to 2022’s Loose Future, was released at the end of January; one of 2026’s first great records. Recorded directly to tape in a vintage analog studio in the Hollywood Hills, it’s a heavy, hazy, and beautiful record, a continuation of her rich, detailed songwriting but all swept up in new sentiments, new sonic shapes. Throughout, the words that colour her songs feel held on a precipice, right out on the dizzying edge of things.
Recorded in ten breathless days back in 2024, it took a lot of work to shape Valentine into life. Courtney describes that as “back-end stuff”, life carrying on behind the scenes as life does. A close family member became very ill and she began caretaking for them, which saw work and deadlines accumulate and pass by. This additional time, however complex as it was, did give Courtney some rare space to really look at the album in context, through different eyes.
“I’ve learned that having time to dream
is very valuable to me.”
“For the first time ever I wasn't trying to think about art direction and just overall vibe while I was busy touring,” she explains. “I was able to truly dive into those elements which felt very helpful in creating the world in which this album lives. That was really nice. In the past I haven’t had time to even dream about what those things might look like. I’ve learned that having time to dream is very valuable to me.”
Sonically, Valentine bristles and buzzes with live energy. It was inspired by Lee Hazelwood and Big Star’s Third, songwriting that defies its genres by offering something unexpectedly dark and brooding. “That Big Star record was so intense, sort of free and manic,” she says. “Nobody wanted that record! That was the kind of record that I wanted to make. Something dark and deep, with a lot of layers and sonic butterflies.”
Valentine opens with ‘Pendulum Swing’, thirty seconds of soft piano and empty space, before the whole thing leaps into life with a powerful, heady rush of voice and crashing drums. Intense and free, dark and deep.
Lyrically, thematically, Valentine’s journey was a knotted and complicated endeavour. “There were some very personal things that were happening that made the songs,” Courtney says, of the album’s heavy heart. “One of my family members was actively dying, which was very intense. At the same time I was also falling in love, and it was not a very smooth ride into that, which added to the intensity of it all. It was a very strange time that broke these songs.”
What came from those moments, from Courtney’s reflections of them, is a record about love and loss, but not plainly those two things. In its written introduction, Courtney describes it as “a record in pursuit of love”rather than a snapshot of its glossy surface. The songs wilt and weave and grow. They falter and flinch. Dust swirls and settles, hearts hold heavy but they stutter too. “Ultimately the record is about limerence,” Courtney says, digging in a little deeper, “and how a lot of people feel limerence and confuse it for love. To me, a valentine is the ultimate object of limerence. It’s not very deep. It’s very surface level. You become obsessed with having this one thing, this object of love, when love is always a lot more than that.”
Across the album, Courtney takes that one flicker of an idea and examines it in a variety of ways. Love is always more. It falters and fades, just like the best of us. That aforementioned opening track shines a light on something splintered and damaged (“If I get what I want / Gotta let the pendulum swing / Can't be good for too long,” she sings), while a song like ‘Magic Touch’ folds in something altogether more sentimental and straightforward: “I light up when you’re around.”
Then there’s the album’s centrepiece, ‘Little Picture Of A Butterfly’, a striking song of peaks and dips that looks itself right in the eye in the middle of heartbreak, of things falling apart. “Guess I'm smoking cigarettes / I'm driving around in a red corvette,” she sings. “Guess I'm single in a little black dress / Like some widow to this big old mess.”
“You really have to shed your ego to love somebody in a true way,” Courtney says, expanding on her thoughts. “I think that’s what I mean; that the true embodiment of love is very selfless, very free of expectation. When you’re young, you believe love is something you just get – like a valentine – but it’s so much more than that. Love is not a tit-for-tat, it’s a surrendering.”
The songs that come together on Valentine came from a surrendering of sorts, written the throes of loss and also new love, when there was just enough distance to see those two things in life’s bigger picture. “When I’m really in grief and heartache I can’t really write. Grief is not linear of course but I think there’s a moment when you’re a little bit away from the eye of the storm, but not completely removed from the situation,” Courtney says. “This record was definitely written from there. These songs came when I needed them to come. I didn’t try and sit and write about that grief or that love. Songs sort of close a gap, in a way. At least they do in my own life. They've always been very big time markers. They've helped me say ‘this is the story and now we're gonna keep moving forward’.”
“The true embodiment of love is very selfless, very free of expectation. Love is not a tit-for-tat, it’s a surrendering.”
For all of the weight it carries, Valentine never sinks. That intensity is ever-present but brightness bursts from its smaller moments. Andrews’ voice remains a thing of wonder, carrying each and every moment in that golden rich timbre that has been telling stories across the past couple of decades now. The album holds new tones, new shadows though, all brought on and in by the nature of the recording process. It was recorded in a whirlwind, a “chaotic experience” that saw Courtney, and the album’s co-producer Jerry Bernhardt, playing almost every instrument, aside from drums which were provided by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Bear.
She’d already named the album Valentine when the album’s engineer, Michael Harris, told them about a “time capsule studio” up in the Hollywood Hills that had sat empty for thirty years. A place that still had orange carpets on the walls and all kinds of vintage equipment. Things once hidden, and now unearthed. Just the kind of analog space they’d been looking for. It was called Valentine Recording Studio, Michael told them. A remnant of Capitol Records' heyday, a place where the Beach Boys recorded, its name a complete coincidence.
Songs were recorded directly to tape, each one a performance captured live in the room. The days were playful and exploratory. Courtney played the flute she dug out from her childhood bedroom, unplayed for years. Accidents happened, some were discarded while others remain. The pressure on each take was high, adding an edge to the recordings that is palpable even now. Any notions of perfection were shed and left at the door. “If you make a perfect sounding record in 2025, then it may not have been made by a human at all,” Courtney states. “I think that will become more and more integral to culture. There’s a real desire, I think, to go back to those records we love from the 60s and 70s that all have bad bass notes on them.”
Like any great story told, Valentine is shaped – beautifully so – by its beginning, middle and end. ‘Pendulum Swing’ is its bold opener, while the deft ‘Outsider’ sits at its emotional centre. It’s a stunning moment, dream-like in its delivery but caught in the grip of a complicated kind of pain. A hushed bed of gentle 80s synths and sepia-toned keys set the mood, while Andrews’ voice pirouettes on the surface as the sorrow tugs at the ankles from below: “I wanna be an outsider, It's too painful looking in,” she sings.
“I think I've always had this inherent feeling of outsiderness,” Courtney shares. “I was an only child. I was raised as a latchkey kid. My mom worked two jobs, and worked at night, so by the age of 7 I was babysitting myself. I was alone a lot. I think that that song just felt so true to how I've felt throughout my life. I feel like everybody has moments where they feel like that,” she continues.
“We're all alone in our own bodies. We can't get into anybody else's minds. I really wanted to write a simple song about that feeling; just a clear and simple tune, a Neil Young-type song.”
The album’s closing chapter comes in the form of ‘Hangman’, a song that feels far weightier than its three-minutes and forty-five second runtime. Beautifully drawn and delivered, it’s a weighty ballad, all swaying vocals and a sense of intimacy that ribbon-bow the album’s sentiments.
“Those lyrics, ‘I don’t want to live like the hangman, always asking for vowels”, are about thinking you need this one thing to make everything okay,” Courtney explains. “What I’m saying is that if there’s one thing you need then it has to just be love. Love first. Love ahead of anything else. The limerence, the desperation…you have to be more open than that. Limerence is a closed, narrow-minded thing. It’s very selfish actually.”
“So many songs and books and movies are about that obsession: ‘I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, until I get this one thing’. It’s a very capitalist way of thinking, actually. ‘Once I receive this, my life will be improved’. But I don’t think it’s about getting the thing,” Courtney adds. “I think it’s about spreading your arms out and emanating something. That’s what it should be. That’s love. I think there’s a lot of beauty in life when you open yourself up to that lack of expectation.”
“It’s about spreading your arms out and emanating something. That’s what it should be. That’s love.”
It’s no surprise that Valentine, as a body of work, is wholly earnest. It has to be. You can’t open your arms to love, to the world, without such sincerity. It’s not asking anything of you, but it sincerely hopes you spend some time listening to it regardless. It believes wholeheartedly in the words it has to share.
Courtney cares a lot about those words. Aside from her music, she writes poetry and is also currently sketching out her first long-form work. A new poetry collection, Love Is a Dog That Bites When It's Scared, was released in September of 2025 and digs into the weeds of love and loss in much the same way as she does throughout Valentine. She says that despite belonging to the same world, the two practices come from different head-spaces. Poetry comes from the head, she says, music from the heart.
This new music, like all that’s come before it, is full of heart, her heart. It's handled with the same care and attention it takes to hold not only someone else’s heart but also your own. She had to go to some dark places, and stumble through some dark times, to find the roots of Valentine, but these songs take her back to the sunlight, back to the wide open air. It’s no surprise that she passes these songs onto us from the top of a cliff, lungs full of bracing, fresh air.
“Now that it's all done, you just hope that people glean meaning in their own life from it,” Courtney says finally. “What I love about music is when a record somehow makes sense of, or makes me feel a certain way during, a specific time in my life. When it gives me hope, or understanding, or a feeling that I never had before. I think that's always what I hope people take away from my records, and it’s my hope for Valentine too.”
Valentine is out now, via Thirty Tigers
Courtney Marie Andrews tours this month, and plays the following shows:
20th February 2026 – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
21st February – Whelan's, Dublin
22nd February – Gorilla, Manchester
23rd February – Saint Luke's, Glasgow
25th February – Hare & Hounds, Birmingham
26th February – Islington Assembly Hall, London
27th February – The Lantern, Bristol
28th February – Chalk, Brighton
2nd March – Boule Noire, Paris
3rd March – TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht
4th March – Cactus Café, Bruges
5th March – AB Club, Brussels
6th March – Metropool, Hengelo
8th March – Lido, Berlin
9th March – Nochtspeicher, Hamburg
11th March – Pustervik, Gothenburg
12th March – Debaser Strand, Stockholm
13th March – John Dee, Oslo
14th March – Plan B, Malmö
15th March – Hotel Cecil, Copenhagen
