Inside most musicians, there’s a struggle between two competing forces: the desire to make music with others, and the need to be alone.
Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Kristin Andreassen — whose first solo album in nine years, “Gondolier,” drops in February — is familiar with the struggle, which plays across all genres but somehow feels embedded in the DNA of folk music, where superstar solo careers have been launched from the relative safety of linked-arm ensembles. “It’s the central conflict in my journey for the last 10 years,” Andreassen said.
Andreassen clog-danced professionally in Annapolis, Md., before joining Uncle Earl, an all-female Americana band, in 2003; they recorded two studio albums for Rounder Records (the second, 2007’s “Waterloo, Tennessee,” was produced by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones). While that was happening, Andreassen also formed Sometymes Why with songwriters Aoife O’Donovan (Crooked Still) and Ruth Unger Merenda (Mike + Ruthy); joined the Boston-based Sub Rosa songwriting collective; founded the Miles of Music Camp in Lake Winnipesaukee, N.H.; and released “Kiss Me Hello,” her first solo album, in 2006.
But “Kiss Me Hello” came with a surprise: A single, “Crayola Doesn’t Make A Color For Your Eyes,” won the 2007 John Lennon Songwriting Contest and virtually owned SiriusXM’s Kids Place Live channel for several weeks. Andreassen performed “Crayola” on NPR’s “A Prairie Home Companion” and was heard by actress-singer Tyne Daly, who incorporated it into her popular cabaret act. A music video for “Crayola” has since been viewed more than a half-million times on YouTube.
While “Crayola” opened doors for Andreassen, “it also became a little confusing to know which door to walk through,” she said. Not surprisingly, industry forces began to pull her into the orbit of kid’s music. She pulled back.
“People were calling me to play shows for kids… Finally, I was like, ‘It’s not really what I do’.”
With “Gondolier,” Andreassen reclaims her solo career, with ferocity. Most of the songs were written during week-long Sub Rosa retreats at Lake Winnipesaukee and subsequently recorded with Robin McMillan in Brooklyn. O’Donovan and Merenda, along with Chris Eldridge and Paul Kowert of the Punch Brothers and others, appear on the album.
Andreassen and Eldridge will perform together at Cafe Nine in New Haven on Wednesday, Jan. 7, on a bill with Goodnight Moonshine (Molly Venter, of Red Molly, and Roosevelt Dime’s Eben Pariser) before heading to Maryland, North Carolina, West Virginia and Tennessee.
Sonic touchstones on “Gondolier” include fingerpicked guitars, fiddles, organs, woodwinds (played by Alec Spiegelman), brushed drumheads and Andreassen’s breathy, vibrato-free voice. It’s a collection of gorgeous indie-folk songs, with lyrics and song titles (“The Fish and the Sea,” “How the Water Walks,” “The Boat Song,” and so on) that betray her current obsession with water.
On “Lookout,” an upbeat, two-step bounce with Beatle-esque chord changes, she reaches out to someone who’s been through this particular hurricane before (“and with every revolution, it’s crawling up the coast / I got a flashlight and a flask, but I need a friend the most”).
“Simmon,” a slow waltz with two-part harmony vocals, fiddles and gentle reeds, started out as a writing exercise: an old couplet (“you get a line and I’ll get a pole”) spins out into newer, more personal terrain (“together we’ll go down to that old crawdad hole”). This happens elsewhere, too.
Other songs nod toward Brooklyn-style chamber folk (atmospheric footsteps, then somber piano chords, cello and more reeds on “How the Water Walks”) or West Coast ’60s pop; kaleidoscopic, near-psychedelic lyrics of “The Boat Song,” for example, spoken/sung in streams of consciousness, over a dreamy Wurlitzer.
“For some reason my dreams are all about water,” Andreassen sings, “it replaces the concrete / I can breathe it like air,” alongside plucked-bass notes — not unlike Carole Kaye’s sound on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” And (of course) more woodwinds.
Andreassen, by nature a collaborator, said she’s enjoying life as a solo act. “I’d never played a whole tour by myself until last summer,” she said. “There’s liberation to be found in that, to change a song in the moment, to interact with the audience.” And nearly a decade after the success of “Crayola,” she’s hoping some of the adult fans she won over with “Kiss Me Hello” are still around.
“Someday, maybe I’ll do a whole tour of kids music, but that’s not what the songs I’m writing [now] are about,” Andreassen said. “Somehow, magically, I managed to strike a chord [with “Crayola”] that reaches different age groups and audiences… I’m trying to find some of my audience.”
KRISTIN ANDREASSEN AND CHRIS ELDRIDGE perform on Wednesday, Jan. 7 at Cafe Nine in New Haven. Showtime is 8 p.m. Tickets are $10. Information: cafenine.
