Courtney Marie Andrews wrote Old Flowers like someone still holding the bouquet long after the ceremony’s over. The record isn’t just about heartbreak—it is heartbreak, stripped bare and left humming in a near-empty room. “These are personal, intimate conversations,” she told me. “We asked ourselves, ‘Does it need anything?’ And if it didn’t, we didn’t add it.”
That restraint became the album’s quiet weapon. Across sparse arrangements—mostly just piano, guitar, and air—Andrews unpacks the end of a nine-year relationship with both tenderness and surgical precision. “It wasn’t that I set out to write a breakup record,” she says. “It’s just that it was all I could think about. Nothing else would come out.”
That kind of emotional tunnel vision could be claustrophobic in lesser hands, but Andrews has a knack for turning grief into landscape. “Love and heartbreak are long stories,” she says. “There’s not just one feeling tied up in them.” Old Flowers captures every phase: denial, bargaining, quiet acceptance, and the fragile grace of wishing your ex well years later. “It feels like the development of grief,” she explains. “You start with the shock, and by the end, you’re writing the letter you never sent.”
When she sings “I may never let love in again,” it lands with the kind of sincerity that makes you wince a little. “That’s exactly how I felt in that moment,” she says. “And sure, that changes. But songs capture the truth of a second. That’s what makes them worth writing.”
If Honest Life (her 2016 breakthrough) was Andrews learning who she was, Old Flowers is her realizing what that costs. “Back then, I didn’t completely know myself as a woman,” she says. “This record comes from someone more world-weary—not hopeless, just a little more aware.”
She’s not one to hide behind metaphors. “I’ve always believed songs stop belonging to you once you finish them,” she says. “You tie up the existential bow, and then you give them away. They’re the world’s now.”
Still, she’s not immune to small miracles. Take “If I Told,” arguably the album’s centerpiece—a song written in a green room between opening sets for Tyler Childers. “I had a bottle of wine and fifteen minutes,” she says, laughing. “It just poured out. I can’t even tell you where the melody came from. That’s the mystery.”
Andrews’ influences stretch beyond the usual Nashville orbit. She cites poet Jack Gilbert’s “Flying Not Failing” as a compass for the album’s emotional core. “That poem changed how I see love,” she says. “It’s about how we fall and rise again—it shaped a lot of Old Flowers.”
Outside the studio, she found herself standing on another kind of hallowed ground: the Grand Ole Opry stage. “It was New Year’s Eve, and I got to sing ‘You’ve Got Gold’ with John Prine,” she recalls. “It was surreal. One of the best nights of my life.” She’d sung “In Spite of Ourselves” with him before, a duet that fit her voice like a wink. “There’s no better duet song than that,” she says. “John knew how to write for two people better than anyone.”
For all its heartache, Old Flowers doesn’t wallow—it breathes. The production is light enough to float, the lyrics heavy enough to anchor you. Andrews calls it a snapshot of a person mid-evolution: “In five years, I’ll feel different about this record. That’s the point. You write to figure out who you were.”
She may have written Old Flowers in the ashes, but the thing still smells faintly of smoke and hope—proof that endings can sing as sweetly as beginnings.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
