Singer/songwriter Jill Andrews, a Nashville veteran and the voice behind most sad songs on TV, dives into the good, the bad, and the ugly on her EP, ‘Big Feelings.’
Stream: “Big Feelings” – Jill Andrews
Singer/songwriter Jill Andrews has been in the music business for two decades.
Known for her folk and bluegrass sounds from her time as part of The Everybodyfields, Andrews has toured with The Avett Brothers, Willie Nelson, and The Secret Sisters; collaborated with Anderson East on his track, “Say Anything”; and has had her own music featured on Grey’s Anatomy, This Is Us, Wynonna Earp, and many more.
If you’ve heard a sad song on your favourite television show, chances are, it might be Jill Andrews’. She is also part of The Hush Kids, a duo with fellow artist Pete Groenwald, and if that wasn’t enough, Andrews has released seven albums and EPs, as well as a book, as a solo artist.
Her latest EP, Big Feelings, is set to release March 27 via Tone Tree Music.
I spoke to Andrews a week after the US presidential election, which Donald Trump won. A few weeks prior, Andrews had released her EP’s first single, “Good News.” With lyrics like, “It’s hard to know where it all goes after this, but I’m sending up a wish for good news,” Andrews, like many others, had been hoping and praying for a different result. When we met, the sadness in the air was palpable. Good news was in short supply.
It has now been four months since Andrews and I spoke, and I can’t say that the feelings have changed, but what that does mean is that Andrews’ EP is very much needed. Big Feelings is a six-track record that spans the intimate moments within us, right through to global feelings.
It touches on Andrews’ faith, her love for her children and family, and her sensitivities, alongside the global uncertainties that inevitably bleed into to all of our personal lives. The sound reminds one of Jill Andrews’ previous record The War Inside, which dealt with similar themes, but against the backdrop of a more stable world.
In short, Big Feelings makes the political personal and the personal political.
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:: stream/purchase Big Feelings here ::
:: connect with Jill Andrews here ::
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Watch: “Good News” – Jill Andrews
A CONVERSATION WITH JILL ANDREWS
Atwood Magazine: First off, thank you for agreeing to speak to us about your upcoming record Big Feelings. I really love the first single, “Good News.” It has The War Inside vibes, which I absolutely love and that is one of my favourite album’s of yours. I can’t help but connect the song the current political landscape. It was released before the US election, and it felt like a prayer for better things. Can you talk about where the song came from and what influenced it?
Maybe there’s a life out there
A life like I remember
Where people laugh,
where love comes back
Maybe it gets better
And all the world seems crazy now
And all the talk is cruel
It’s hard to know where it all goes after this
But I’m sending up a wish for good news
Jill Andrews: Yeah, I released it very specifically at that time for that reasons. I’ll just speak specifically about the US. There’s just there’s a lot of anger in a lot of different people and a lot of division and it’s really sad. I was I was hoping that we could move past all that with our leadership and unfortunately, we are right back in it.
I think the thing that worries me and makes me so upset about it, is that it feels like we’ve lost our humanity. The connection that we have with other people and the idea of ‘if I help you, you help me, we help each other, we help everybody’, has gotten lost. I know people are rightfully angry in the US because they feel like their work doesn’t lead to an income that can support their families and they feel unseen and unheard. I think there’s a lot of issues that we have to figure out over here and, that song, “Good News” was exactly what you said, a prayer, like my own personal prayer to bring some sort of peace and connection between people.
It’s very much the same here in the UK in terms of cost of living, wages not increasing and people not having an income that can support a family. I have friends who live in the US, so I really feel for those who vulnerable. I worry that what happened with the election results will influence other countries and also what happens to people within those countries, especially women and girls and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Jill Andrews: I think the best thing that we can do is just be kind to other people, you know? That’s that’s my plan. It’s just like keep trying to be kind to my neighbors, my friends and my community and trying to keep lifting people up as much as I can. Also not get into the whole cesspool of the negative comments. Not even just negative comments, but just the really inhumane cesspool of social media commentary and all of that. It doesn’t make a difference. You’re not gonna change people’s minds by disagreeing with it them. We are really missing just peaceful conversation with people that disagree with us, you know?
When did you start writing for the EP? Did you know it was going to be an EP?
Jill Andrews: I didn’t know that it was going to be an EP. I was just I was writing and I wrote a lot of these songs with a with a friend of mine Dustin Christensen. He’s one of my favorite songwriters. We wrote, I think, three, maybe even four songs off this, and then I wrote the rest myself. I didn’t really know it was gonna be an EP, but it just felt like a good bitesize thing for me to do.
I think that’s honestly, it was more like of a pragmatic sort of reason. I was just like, ‘yeah, that feels like something I can bite off right now’. This music just felt so much like the spirit of the times for me. It came quickly to me and then I wanted to get it out.
All the artwork is clad in red. Was that a deliberate decision, or was that an organic thing?
Jill Andrews: Yeah, it was deliberate. I’ve worked with the same photographer for many years. Her name is Fairlight Hubbard and she’s amazing. She’s one of the most creative people that I’ve met and I told her that the album was gonna be called Big Feelings and we talked a lot about imagery and I was just really drawn to the color red. I love red. It’s so beautiful. It felt bold and big and what I wanted to portray.
I love her artwork! I love the artwork she did for Lily & Madeleine. Her photography and art direction is very surreal but also very grounded in nature. What was the first song you wrote for the EP? Did you did you know what story you wanted to tell and did you have the title already in mind?
Jill Andrews: I didn’t have the title. I wrote all these songs in a pretty small span of time. I want say it was probably like, I don’t know, six months or something, which is a pretty small timeframe for me. Maybe it was even less than that. It was a snapshot of how I was feeling.
I didn’t have like a theme or anything, but the theme just came together very quickly for me because it was very obvious that a lot of these songs are just big feelings, which felt like a great title because whether it’s big feelings about my own life or the state of the world or a man I meet on the street. I’m such a huge empath and I’m a very sensitive person and so I think all of that is really reflected in the songs.
I feel like a lot of my albums I’m writing about relationships and this album I really stepped outside of that. I just took a took a step back and was looking at my life, kind of from an outside perspective and looking at the world in a different way.
It’s quite an existential record. It's not love songs as such. It’s interesting you said that the record is snapshot of how you were feeling at that time because I was going to say that’s how it comes across. You've touched on faith and religion in all your albums. How does your faith come into the creative process when you're when you're writing?
Jill Andrews: That’s a good question. I think that with this album, I kind of stepped into that even more. When I would sit down and write, I would say, ‘hey, here I am, a blank slate, if there’s anything that you want me to say, let me know.’ And, you know, sometimes nothing would come from that, sometimes things would. I think the main for me with this album was, I wanted to portray hope.
The song “God at Your Bedside,” I wrote that song for a lot of little girls, but especially for my little girl, because she has a lot of anxiety at night. She worries about a lot of really really big problems, especially right before bed and I can relate to that so much because I do the same thing. I go to sleep and I wake up and my mind is spinning and spinning. I guess I just wanted to portray portray hope in this album.
I definitely get that vibe. It's obviously quite sad, but it's also about keeping going regardless of what's going on.
Jill Andrews: The song “Glory” is a different take on faith. That song I wrote that song for my Aunt Christine, my dad’s sister. She has she lost all three of her children in different ways over the past few years. It’s been a really hard time and we’re very close. I also wrote “Back Home” off The War Inside for her, after she had lost her sons a year apart and then her daughter passed away recently.
I wrote the song for her. It’s not a hopeful song. It’s more of an angry song. I wrote it because she told me once that she was just really tired of people putting a godly spin on why she had lost her children. There is no hope, you know, my kids are gone, they’re never coming back, and I just thought that was I mean, it’s true. It’s really, really sad, and so I wanted to, I don’t know, I wanted to kind of speak into that from what I could only assume her perspective would be.
Has she heard it? What does she think?
Jill Andrews: Yes, she loves it!
That's a really nice gift to give someone.
Jill Andrews: She’s on my mind a lot for sure.
Have you got a favorite song on that?
Jill Andrews: I have a few favorites. I really love “Good News.” I love “Big Feelings,” and I I really love “Old Scars” especially too.
“Old Scars” is a song that I wrote about a man I met at the release party for my last album, Modern Age. I was having a party at a venue celebrating the release and there was a man there taking the trash out and sweeping, and we started talking and he was asking me about my music and he told me that he had moved to Nashville to become a musician. I asked him how it was going, and he said, “It didn’t work out for me.” I then found out he’s homeless. I actually see him quite a bit. He is really sweet and working really hard to bring his life back together. He’s a really sweet guy, and I wrote that song for him.
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Jill Andrews’ ‘Big Feelings’ EP is out March 27 via Tone Tree Music!
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:: stream/purchase Big Feelings here ::
:: connect with Jill Andrews here ::
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Stream: “Old Scars” – Jill Andrews
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