Twelve months on from the release of her acclaimed 2018 LP May Your Kindness Remain, Courtney Marie Andrews is commemorating its one-year anniversary with a stirring batch of acoustic covers, including the albums title track and three other songs.
Cut in Nashville with Andrews alone on guitar, the stripped-down arrangement of May Your Kindness Remain showcases her in the soul-belting role shes grown to fully inhabit. Warm and rich despite its sparseness, the new recording allows her voice to hit some spine-tingling registers, with nothing but her gently snapped guitar strings and the recording room to help it dissipate.
The sliding bass lines of William Moore join Andrews on the other three tracks, with Took You Up feeling positively jaunty by comparison and Rough Around the Edges taking on a stumbling, cascading quality in the two-person setup. Most haunting of all may be Border, where Andrews all but spits out her land of the free refrain and the two instruments swirl angrily beneath her vocals.
Andrews plays a run of four shows with John Prine in Georgia and New York on April 5th, before joining Deer Tick for a month-long stint as opener for their spring tour.