Nashville — when Ingrid Andress One afternoon in July, when I stepped out the door of her house in the hilly suburb of Nashville, barefoot, wet my hair, and played host at a game before rushing off on a tour date, the shiny Yamaha Grand A piano could be seen behind her.
In 2017, just before she signed her label deal, there was a moment when she dreamed of moving camp to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles and walking down the road paved by Joni Mitchell. Adding an oversized instrument to her living room makes it formal. The 30-year-old pop-savvy singer and her songwriter Andrés are sticking to country to make a home in her music. That doesn’t mean she conforms to genre orthodoxy—what she does, as her manager Bryce Skokin puts it, is “funny subversion of the status quo.”
“More Hearts Than Mine” The ballad from Andress’s 2020 debut, “Lady Like,” showcases the rich detail of her ruminations and became a radio breakout after she struggled to release it as her first official single. She left her latest Top 20 hit, the Sam Hunt duet “Wishful Drinking,” out of the physical version of her new album, “Good Person,” just to be clear. The new LP’s immersive arrangement, which comes out Friday, is meant to set the mood, and its narrative arc is about gradually coming to terms with your partner not being a partner at all, and turning yourself into something new. I take great care in opening myself up.
It’s common for modern country artists to emphasize their hometown and build an entire persona around it. The suburb of Denver, where Andres spent her youth, is just a footnote to her story. Since her father was a coach for the Colorado Rockies, and her family was evacuated to Arizona each year for spring training, Andrés and her siblings were homeschooled by her mother, who made piano part of her curriculum. I was being screened.
“You lived with your piano teacher, so he could know whether you practiced or not.
Her parents restricted their children’s access to secular pop culture, but Andrés had a way of expanding her horizons. Her neighbor had her CD burned, leaving her label blank so she could scribble the names of modern Christian acts as camouflage. Still, she knew she was missing out.
“I think that’s where my outsider syndrome comes from,” she said.
These sentiments fueled her early songwriting, but track and field was a promising avenue. entered school in the eighth grade. Years later, when she was in Boston to see her World Series game, she heard rehearsals coming from the Berklee College of Music building and went inside to investigate. “I’m going here,” she said. “Fortunately, I had never heard of it, so I didn’t know how prestigious it was.”
Andrés auditioned to study jazz voice, I found myself among students who seemed to be on a professional path. In search of her, she first joined an a cappella group, then another a cappella group, competing on successive seasons of NBC’s competition show, The Sing-Off. Then, a songwriting course taught by hitmaker Kara Dio Guardi introduced Andrés into songcraft. Scouting Nashville on her student trip, she seized her reputation as the “songwriting capital of the world.”
For two years before signing his first publishing deal in 2015, Andrés embarked on a crash course in country songwriting culture, bringing keyboards to the writer’s round, starting with its primary instrument, the guitar. Her publishing office didn’t have a workspace for keyboards. It was suggested that she learn to strum acoustic “like everyone else”.
Andrés engaged a professional and writing appointment at Music Row, who embodied a combination of slick, commercial technology and rugged, traditionally-conscious masculinity she’d never encountered before. Though swayed by her experiences, including being told that her curse was not to become a woman, she is determined to move forward with her respect.
“‘To break the rules, you have to learn the rules,'” she recalled her mentality at the time. “I can’t skip breaking them.” This was a big reality check for me. ”
Demand for songs in the Brother Country style was still huge, With their dirt road revelry and programmed beats, And women’s place is limited, thanks to ongoing inequalities baked into the country’s radio programs. She struggled and started traveling to write songs and create tracks in Los Angeles. Though she had developed her own way of straddling country and pop, she had more than the occasional cut for Charlie’s XCX Her single (“Boys”) and Country Her album. I was warned that my specialty was neither.
To prove her songs worth recording, Andrés self-released “The Stranger,” a pensive portrait of crumbling intimacy, in 2017 as a hardworking Nashville man. intended it as her last effort. She had already secured an apartment in California and was eager to begin her phase of Laurel’s Canyon. Satellite radio then started playing her ballads and Rebel wanted to meet. “I gave up on Nashville like when everybody got interested,” she said.
But Andres decided to become a country-pop artist, writing and co-producing her work, which had traditionally been separate roles in Nashville. When. ‘”
Eventually, she signed with Warner Music Nashville, reassured that she could continue to be the architect of her sound, and found her manager, Skorkin. Skokin helped steer her pop career, and had also forayed into a storied position in the country music industry.
Andres recorded much of “Lady Like” in the home studio of Sam Ellis (Hunter Hayes, Kane Brown), who later became a key collaborator.. In a video interview, Ellis said, “There’s no question that she has talent and knows what she’s talking about.” have that vocabulary.
What she couldn’t do when her debut album was released in March 2020 was make the promotional rounds. But even without her peers and the chance to win a gatekeeper, she was nominated for the genre marquee her award show and a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist in her category. “I ended up front row at the Grammy Awards because literally no one knew who I was,” she said.
During lockdown, Andres became very introspective about relationships in general, and hers in particular. “I realized I wasn’t happy,” she said. I couldn’t stop writing about it. ‘ She explored her dynamics and emotions until she made her song cycles about new love realizations, calculations and conscious risks.
Despite the slightly higher budget for the second LP, Andrés was drawn to Ellis’ home studio. They sourced more of his drum parts for his remote recordings, but Andrés removed some of them, making the rhythms rippling and implicitly present. . Synthesizers are mingled with the traditional country instrument, the steel guitar.
“No Choice” is her anguished account of why it was necessary to leave for self-preservation, while “Blue” incorporates the torch song and captures the sensuality of romance. , rejoices with a melancholic awareness that it may disappear. And at the end of the title track, a quest for religious authority, She pleads, “God’s right hand, what does it feel like?
“Anyone who says the country is stupid, that makes me so angry,” Andrés casually said with certainty after studying the country for nearly a decade. Smarter than any pop song ever.”