Andrea Peterman

Andrea was born in Minneapolis and spent her early childhood moving around the northern Midwest states of Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. When she was 11 years old, her family moved to the mountain town of Missoula, Montana, where she stayed through high school. She headed back to the Midwest to attend Northwestern University, where she studied classical voice, earned a music degree, and picked up a love of cheap travel.

By her early 20s, she had road-tripped all across North America, from Tijuana to Bangor, from Anchorage to the Florida Keys. Day jobs paid the way in New York and Los Angeles, where she tested her vocal skills in musical theater, jazz and pop, and acted in theater and film. In L.A., she met guitarist/composer/producer John Abella. The two began collaborating, playing jazz, blues, and pop standards for area events.

Around that time, Andrea picked up an old guitar she had been given years earlier. After all of her training, it wasn’t until she taught herself a few chords on that guitar that she wrote her first song. It took 20 minutes and what came out was along the lines of traditional country. “As a kid, I listened to a lot of AM country radio in the car with my dad,” she says, “apparently, it made an impression.”

Andrea brought the song to John, who promptly recorded it and encouraged her to write more. She did, and soon she was playing her country-tinged originals in clubs and bars around Los Angeles with her band, The Alternators.

At the tail end of 2006, Andrea moved to Seattle with her husband and young daughter and spent the next year working on her first album, Miles To Go. She can be seen playing shows around the Pacific Northwest.