Pinpointing the precise beginning of something that you have made is hardly an exact science. There are, yes, specific dates and times, signposts along the way, recording sessions, drafts, edits, torn sheets, disarray of dictaphone sketches - but the combined influences, for myself, in making my debut solo album, Only Mirrors, came scattershot across the years...
My continued performance alongside Jimmy Lavalle as an active and touring member of The Album Leaf for over 5 years. Years of writ...
Pinpointing the precise beginning of something that you have made is hardly an exact science. There are, yes, specific dates and times, signposts along the way, recording sessions, drafts, edits, torn sheets, disarray of dictaphone sketches - but the combined influences, for myself, in making my debut solo album, Only Mirrors, came scattershot across the years...
My continued performance alongside Jimmy Lavalle as an active and touring member of The Album Leaf for over 5 years. Years of writing and playing music together with my closest friends in Via Satellite. Finding myself amidst rigorous childhood piano lessons and performances in recitals, plays, and talent shows as a kid. The fortune to tour internationally and experience the broken beauty the world possesses. Being robbed multiple times, battling setbacks from the loss of precious gear and vanished recorded works. Discovering my adoption, and my supportive parents' guidance in finding my roots. Roots that came to light in Sven-Erik Seaholm, a songwriter/producer who never know he had fathered a son - and, as it has been for over 10 years time, like most recorded projects I've ever done, Sven and I co-produced Only Mirrors together, combining our talents again for what has become our favorite collaboration.
This album is full of these influences - an extension of my own struggles and victories. They are colorful balloons that fade out into atmospheric heights. They are stories of longing with pinpricks of light at the end. They are kindergarten ballads, lullabies that grown-ups have drowned out amidst the taxi cabs, the alarm clocks, the deadlines and the ever-present bill debt. These songs are bundles of contradictions, not unlike the clash of so many cultures under our overpasses and skyscrapers. If what we see are only mirrors of that which is to come, then this album is my take on a vision of how the world truly is - a bright photograph, captured in time, trailed by ghostly figures of our pasts, childlike prisms of color and spontaneous life - for me, a marker of all that we are and all that we may be.
-Drew Andrews 2008
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