Courtney Marie Andrews // The Valentine Tour with special guest Taylor Zachry

On the honey shores of Cape Cod in a beach shack during the summer of 2020, Courtney Marie Andrews found self-love and her voice. Every morning, she’d walk 6-8 miles around the back trails of an island and meditate on her life, perusing old memories and patterns like browsing a used bookshop. That summer of introspection led her to a joyous sense of beginnings and ends. When she let love for herself in, she therein let the outside love in, too—the summer feeling, the swaying cypress, the full moon, and the possibility of healthy love. This phase came only right after one of her darkest, though, where being alone with oneself was the most terrifying thing you could do. After more than a decade on the road, the Phoenix-born songwriter, poet, and painter finally had the space to process all the highs and lows of a life of constants. She was finally ready to make a record of triumph, while not completely forgetting the years that made her. Produced with Sam Evian at his New York studio, that record is Loose Future, out October 7 on Fat Possum Records. Her guideposts were lots of harmonies and alternative percussion. The rest was pure exploration. At Flying Cloud Recordings, she dipped in the creek every morning before proceeding for the day. She wanted to embody the feeling of letting love in. Taking the dip is what letting love in feels like. Sometimes you plunge, and sometimes you walk slowly in.

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Nashville's Taylor Zachry is getting set to release his debut solo album, aptly titled Songs I've Had Forever. He plays in the beloved Nashville band Blank Range and has toured with artists like Courtney Marie Andrews, Erin Rae, Yola, Rayland Baxter, and Jonny Fritz to name a few. In 2020, he teamed up with producer Ryan McFadden (Torres, Meg Elsier, Parker Millsap) to start recording his own songs. What started as a straightforward Nashville indie-folk record morphed over the following years into an exploration of Taylor himself, both the person and the artist.

Over the course of making this album, both Ryan and Taylor faced some of life's most defining events: family deaths, marriage, falling in and out of love, truly staring in the face of life's biggest and toughest truths. In the words of Ryan, "Nothing but truth holds up after five years of life’s tumbling."

The resulting album, Songs I've Had Forever, is truth at its core. It is a record that feels as if it arrived from somewhere else - dug up from a mysterious basement somewhere or one that magically appeared in your collection. It is for fans of Neutral Milk Hotel, The Microphones, Sparklehorse: these enigmatic projects that feel like a window into something more.

Taylor has become known in circles of Nashville for his unpredictable and nearly indescribable live shows that blend songs from his record with semi-improvised and intensely refreshing performances using cassette tape loops, a Barbie karaoke machine, and other objects.

In the words of producer Ryan McFadden:
"The record began to sound unearthed more than constructed. We no longer knew the guys who built it and therefore we could love it without ego, and judge it without ego, the work had nothing much to do with us. Feeling the freedom in that, we wondered how to separate from a creation in real time, to have objectivity without distance. Taylor started trying to answer that question in his live shows. Not improvisation but somehow to be an immediate audience member to his own performance. What he learned from those shows he brought back to the studio. We put on the original tapes, worked intuitively and found a path that allowed us to finish the record."

Songs I've Had Forever has the potential to be indie canon. The kind of record you return to again and again, that changes and ages with you and always offers something more.

It's maybe best summed up by fellow Nashville musician and producer, Jerry Bernhardt (Courtney Marie Andrews, Erin Rae, Ron Gallo), in a note to Taylor after he first heard the record: "It speaks to all that is holy to me in music...So natural, absolutely next level. You have created such a world with this collection of songs. A bent, hallucinogenic, enchanting and inviting world."

Taylor has opening dates on an upcoming Courtney Marie Andrews tour in Spring of 2026 in both the US and EU.