andy moore
Richmond, Virginia, United States
Music
Press
Sure it's easy to say singer/songwriter Andy Moore has a lot in common with the Indigo Girls. She herself admits they're a huge unfluence on her. But the Massachusetts-based folkie is a lot more than that, with hefty amounts of soul and power tumbling from her, through her words and through her passionate melodies. At times it's Jess Klein or Jonatha Brooke who comes to mind; at others it's anyone from Stacey Earle to Tracy Chapman who comes bubbling up from the lush depths of this woman's commanding voice and eloquent stylings.
There's a forcefulness to the emotional gush and rush that comes from Moore's music. You feel the words, often written in simple, straightforward ways that deal with universal subjects, snagging the heart of the listener along this stream of life's everyday ups and downs.
It's a career that began with awkward inspirations at a very young age, what she called an "obsession with Amy Grant." At that time, Moore's bio sheet recalls, "My first guitar cost my folks less than the price of two Happy Meals." By age 10, she'd been given a real acoustic guitar and proceeded to go to town, musically.
In her college years, she became a regular at bars and coffee shops around Penn State and in the Southwest. In 2001, a fateful meeting with gay folkie Eric Himan resulted in her first album, "shifting," a collection of touching albeit bare-bones guitar and voice pairings that contains plenty of ethereal moments.
After moving to Provincetown, Mass., more things clicked in her music career, and she released the uplifting "Dig Right In" last year. Here, these tunes show off her talents against a backdrop of a small combo and glittering harmonies that drift along with her quite nicely into the musical stratosphere. This one is well-produced and helps convey a stronger presence-- the kind of punch her music is dying to impart.
-Andre Hagestedt - Just Out - Portland, Oregon
Discography
shifting -- 2001 Thumbcrown Records (LP)
Dig Right In -- 2004 Rockstar Productions (LP)
Photos
Bio
As I recall, my first guitar cost my folks less than the price of two Happy Meals and had Disney decals on the front of its 12-inch plastic body. My second guitar had genuine steel strings, but still, red decals and a faux volume knob on its simulated Stratocaster-style body limited my true thrashing abilities. My first "real" guitar came at the age of ten when my parents decided that my obsession with Amy Grant had finally gone too far and indeed warranted an acoustic guitars an upcoming holiday surprise. My life has never quite been the same since the arrival of that gift.
After graduating from high school in 1996, I studied abroad in northern Germany. It was during my time in Oldenburg that I really began to explore songwriting and its layers of dimension. Upon my return to the States, I began playing community and university venues across the Southwest. In college at Penn State, I became a regular on the late-night scene in the State College area, performing at university functions and local coffeehouses and bars. Upon the completion of my philosophy degree in the summer of 2001, I began to focus more and more of my energy on my music. In the fall of 2001, with the help of singer-songwriter Eric Himan and Cassandra Buncie, I had the opportunity of releasing my debut album shifting on the Thumbcrown Record label.
In May of 2002, I decided to quit my menial bookseller job and head north to the shores of Provincetown, Massachusetts. There, a landscaper by day, I released the tracks of shifting to the tourist population of Cape Cod, performing on street corners and in local bars and clubs. It was during this summer that I actually wrote and arranged the first of several songs of my sophomore album Dig Right In, released in mid-summer 2004. It was also during this time that I became acquainted with Robin Elder, partner of Rock Star Productions and the future producer/sound engineer of Dig Right In.
I found my experience in Provincetown to be so incredibly stimulating that I opted for a second summer season there in 2003. This time, more prepared for the wicked competitive nightly show scene there, I chose to join forces with another young singer-songwriter living in Provincetown: Mandy Shaw. Together, we formed the acoustic folk-rock duo Autosoul, and we had no trouble holding steady gigs throughout the summer, both as show hosts and as proper headliners. My success, both with Autosoul and as a solo performer in 2003, prompted me to take up the reigns again for two more summers in Provincetown in 2004 and 2005, while a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School in the off-season. Now solidly established and regarded as one of the feature acoustic folk-rock artists on Lower Cape Cod, I've relocated to Richmond, Virginia to pursue a life of Americana music rich with folk-rock flavor.
Soon after catapulting myself deep into the South, the now nationally-acclaimed singer-songwriter Eric Himan invited me out onto the road, a trip which would prove to be my first national tour. In only three and a half weeks in late 2005, Eric and I managed to knock out 23 cities in more than ten different states, playing everywhere from coffee shops and colleges, to clubs and community centers. It was a grand beginning to my nascent career and an experience I plan to revisit.
Since touring with Eric, my music has really come into its own. My heart-string tugging lyrics have always been a crowd favorite; but, now I’m working on the development of multidimensional musical components guaranteed to send my next album (Old Scores to Settle) into uncharted melodious waters. [Cue the clarinets, violins, layered vocals, and percussion.]
Over the years, I've had the opportunity of playing alongside headliners such as Melissa Ferrick, Dan Bern, Beth Hart, Jess Klein, Edie Carey, Ashland Miller of CommonbonD, and Bet Williams. My musical influences, while too numerous to list exhaustively, include Kristen Hall, The Be Good Tanyas, Jackson Browne, Eliza Gilkyson, Shawn Colvin, Stacey Earle, Richard Shindell, and, of course, the Indigo Girls.
September 2007
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