Featured Artist of July 28, 2022
with the EP: Static on Every Station


Artist's Biography

Tom Andes is a New Orleans-based singer, songwriter, and fiction writer with various musical and literary projects. With influences ranging from Johnny Cash to REM, from Prince to Lou Reed, Tom sings songs that set the stories of the lonely, brokenhearted, and downwardly mobile to rowdy, uptempo traditional American music. They run the gamut from finger-picked acoustic blues in the style of Mississippi John Hurt to country to his secular take on gospel to tunes that might have sounded at home on the indie rock charts in the late s.

Born and raised in New Hampshire, in his teens, Tom had a flirtation with grunge and punk. A visit to New Orleans when he was 18 changed his life. It ignited his love of American roots music, especially the country blues that had inspired the musicians he’d grown up listening to. It also began his love affair with the city he calls home.

Currently, Tom gigs around New Orleans doing solo acoustic shows that feature his own songs as well as music by the artists who have inspired him. To support the release of his debut EP, Static on Every Station, he is also performing with a band and has been in the studio working on a follow up EP.

About the Album

This EP is the result of my collaboration with the drummer, producer, and arranger Beau Bishop, who helped me get these songs into fighting shape before we went into the studio. The title track I wrote in my room in San Francisco back in 2003, all but forgot, and had to relearn from an acoustic demo. The rest of the songs on the EP are of more recent vintage, written since 2015 and played at solo acoustic shows in New Orleans. The band on the EP really gelled when Stoo Odom came onboard to play bass, and we got some stellar turns from guest musicians Marc Allen Linam (clarinet on "If You See Me Walking"), Hannah Kreiger-Benson (piano on "Rescue Me"), and David Symons (accordion on "Uptown Blues"). Lewis D'Aubin recorded us at the Consortium of Genius Secret Lab in Harahan, Louisiana, and Myles Boisen mastered the recordings. Photography by Louis Maistros, design by Ed Porter, all of which you should see in the liner notes, which I included in the ZIP file. I released the EP on Bandcamp this year, in 2022. I am calling this Americana because that's a nice catchall for country, blues, and gospel. First track owes a lot to old REM, and the rest dip into more traditional genres. So one could just as easily call it indie Americana, alt-country, or singer-songwriter.

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