Andrea Potts

I was born in Reno, NV in those crazy times when Martin Luther King was assassinated, and Nam was going on, and we were walking on the moon. I moved to California as soon as I could, and stayed there for 11 years, cutting my teeth on a beat-up 12-string guitar and finding my voice. I played at over 20 Women's Music Festivals there, did a benefit concert for Amnesty International, and played on the main stage two different years at Davis's Whole Earth Festival.
I moved to South Dakota in the fall of 98. I played The Sturgis Rally at the Buffalo Chip Campground and other venues for 5 different years there, entered a Battle of the Bands at the Civic Center in Rapid City with my band at the time, Thik Orng, and played various Women's Music Festivals and benefit concerts at the Journey Museum.
Recently, I moved to Madison, WI. I am fascinated with the world - it feels like a really big playground to me, and I am inundated daily by the beauty of it all. I think there's beauty in just about everything, including pain and suffering. I travel a lot, and some of the songs I write are about that, or about the people I meet and what I feel like they said to me with words or otherwise. Some of the songs are about frustration with myself, with the world of humanity and how insane I think our culture is. Some are about communication and how hard that is. Some of the songs are just landscapes with all the intricacies of the valleys and peaks and lakes and sky. Some people say I don't write love songs, but I happen to think all of them are about all different kinds of love.
I love singing. I can't remember when I didn't sing to myself. I sang while I fished for crawfish in the in-between spaces of rocks at Lake Tahoe when I was a kid. When I got a car, my singing temple changed from the Lake to the inside of my vehicle. I started writing poetry when I was a teenager, and being that I was a total freak as a teenager (isn't eveyone?), I wrote some pretty awful stuff that had few gems of genius in them. I left home at 18, and the poems turned into songs.
I play a 12-string guitar because I found one at a garage sale for 40 bucks and became so fascinated with it that I lost the ability to play a 6-string. I realized that some of the instruments I was hearing in my head with my music were represented a little bit in the extra six strings I had. The 12-string challenged me to try to bring the things I heard in my head out of myself and into the music, and I got to be fairly capable of backing my vocals with the instrument.