Name: Andrew Combs
Start: 2019-10-21T21:00:00-06:00
Location: Urban Lounge

Andrew Combs

Urban Partners

Andrew Combs is coming to Salt Lake City!

Urban Lounge

Selfmyth

Bly Wallentine

Andrew Combs is a singer and songwriter whose work bridges the freedom andpossibility of his visual art with the influence of classic writing and storytelling. On hisnew album, Ideal Man, Combs worked with producer/engineer Sam Cohen (KevinMorby, Benjamin Booker) to achieve a more raw, direct sound. The collection wascaptured live in Cohen’s Brooklyn studio, with compact, muscular arrangements fueledby taut, elastic grooves, and also featuring Combs’ longtime collaborators, drummerDom Billet and guitarist/keyboardist/bassist Jerry Bernhardt. While Combs may be bestknown as a singer/songwriter in the classic 1970s Laurel Canyon sense of the term, heproves the true versatility of his work here, often setting his acoustic aside in favor ofatmospheric synthesizers and distorted electric guitars. The songwriting for Ideal Manwas partly inspired by Combs’ recent fascination with painting. Combs started paintingwhen his wife was pregnant (They welcomed a daughter in 2017). “It really changed theway that I write songs,” he reflects. “When I paint, I might start with a very abstract ideaor maybe even just a feeling, but from there I’ll paint and scrape and paint and erase andkeep on painting until something starts to take shape. I just let nature play out.”“I’ve never felt so visually stimulated as I am right now, and this has been a reallyunique way for me to make sense of the record as a whole, to find some sort of commonthread between the music and my life.”Enamored with the fresh creative avenues that painting opened up for him, Combsapplied the same approach to his music, beginning songs with an emotion rather than aconcept and treating lyrical and melodic ideas as raw material that could be added to orlayered over at any point. When he heard the finished recordings, the songs in turnsuggested entire canvases in his mind, and Combs began work on a series of oilpaintings designed to accompany each track on the album.“I started seeing all these motifs and symbols when I listened to the songs,” reflectsCombs, who plans to present the album and the paintings together in a gallery show.“Some of the pieces are more representational and some are more abstract, but I’multimately trying to capture the mystical qualities of each tune rather than theanalytical.”Fatherhood is another obvious source for Combs’ change in perspective and the recordreflects the emotional rollercoaster that comes with raising a child in such turbulenttimes. No longer simply an observer documenting the world as he sees it, Combs findshimself thrust into the role of protector and guardian on these songs, which means thatjoy and hope often come packaged with fear and frustration, anger and anxiety. “Sooften I find myself just sad and disappointed in humanity these days,” he explains. “I’mscared for my daughter and her future on so many levels,” adds Combs, explaining thetumultuous character of some of the album’s lyrical content.Combs first began garnering national attention for his music with the release of WorriedMan, his acclaimed 2012 debut. The record, which received the deluxe reissue treatmentthis year, earned Combs a slot at the iconic Newport Folk Festival alongside dates withShovels &amp; Rope and Houndmouth, and it prompted American Songwriter to proclaimthat “[as far as] first albums go, it’ll be tough to beat this as one of the year’s finest.”Combs followed it up in 2015 with the similarly well-received All These Dreams, whichlanded him performances with Kacey Musgraves and Eric Church among others, andthen signed to New West Records in 2017 for his breakout third album, Canyons Of MyMind. Songs from that record racked up more than 15 million streams on Spotify andprompted raves from Rolling Stone to NPR, who hailed him as “one of Nashville’s mostpoetically gifted young singer-songwriters.”A Dallas native, Combs has called Nashville home since 2006, but when it came time torecord Ideal Man, he opted for a change, heading to Jupiter Recordings in Brooklyn,where he and his bandmates—drummer Dom Billet and multi-instrumentalist JerryBernhardt—cut the album in a series of short bursts with Cohen both playing guitar andproducing.“One of the things I really admired about Sam is that he wants to capture a moment,”says Combs. “In the past, I’ve tended to pursue a studio sound that was really polishedand clean, but I wanted to do something different this time, and I knew that workingwith Sam would lead to more of a loose, psychedelic, spaced-out vibe. We did everythinglive in the studio, even my vocals, and there’s a sense of immediacy and discovery inthose early takes that you can’t recreate.”It’s that immediacy that reaches out and grabs you by the lapel on album opener “Starsof Longing,” an insightful, questioning gem that begins the record with a snare drumcracking like a gunshot. Propelled by a deep-in-the-pocket rhythm section groove, thetrack marries elements of classic soul and funk with psych-rock and sweeping folk asCombs challenges and explores the spiritual journey he’s been on since his Catholicschool days in Texas. “All I’ve learned is all I really know / There’s only love,” he sings,piercing through the pomp and politics of organized religion to get down to the core of itall. The hazy title track bluntly grapples with identity and insecurity, while theR&amp;B-influenced “Hide and Seek” laments the games lovers play to avoid saying whatthey really mean, and the minimalist “Like A Feather” strips romance down to its bareessentials.“This was the first song I wrote for the album, and it started as an experiment to see if Icould write something with just three chords,” says Combs. “I was trying to get myselfout of the mindset that the more chords you use, the better the song is, and this onereally opened up the door for me to write the rest of the record.”Combs worked with some of his favorite writers on the album, including Dylan LeBlanc,Jeff Trott, Joe Henry, and Kenny Childers, but the stories he tells here are deeplypersonal and remarkably vulnerable. The heartrending “Firestarter” watches helplesslyas a friend self-destructs, and the tender “Golden” finds Combs balancing the beauty ofwitnessing his daughter grow up with the wistfulness of knowing that she can’t stay achild forever. It’s perhaps “Born Without A Clue,” though, that best captures theemotional push and pull at play on the album.“That song’s about being a dad, certainly, but I also think it’s about all of us,” saysCombs. “I’m a hopeful, positive person, and I don’t like to dwell too long on thenegative, but it’s so in our faces. There’s no way not to be apprehensive of the worldaround you right now.”A sense of danger and violence underlies the entire record, much as it does the entirecountry, but it only serves to make the moments of beauty and connection here thatmuch more poignant. Life is short and the clock is ticking. Andrew Combs doesn’t planto waste a second.

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