VIDEO: Watch Nashville star Courtney Marie Andrews talk to Phil Hewitt/SussexWorld about her Brighton gig

She is touring on the back of her new album Loose Future which came out in the States last October, the follow-up to her Grammy-nominated 2020 release Old Flowers. Courtney comes with the highest recommendations: Sir Elton John recently said she “reminds me of a young Joni Mitchell.”

“I'm from Phoenix, Arizona originally and I lived in Phoenix until I was about 21 and then I moved to Seattle for seven years. I knew that I wanted to be in a music town so it was a choice really between LA and Nashville and Nashville won because the rents are cheaper! I didn't really think about it being too much of a competitive town. I just think of Nashville being really inspiring. I travel so much that I don’t stay very long in one place but I just think there's something very special about the people that you meet in Nashville and the community and the friends I've made here. There are some special historical places but it's definitely the people that I really love.”

There’s a lovely video to the title track from the new album, Loose Future. You can catch it on YouTube: “I was dating somebody and we were just talking and I said you never know about this loose future and we both laughed. I said that needed to be a song and I went off and wrote it with a friend. I wrote it in five minutes. We just talk for an hour and then we write the song in five or ten minutes. We just click. It's a song about not wanting to jump fully into something like a relationship because you are hesitant because you don't know what the outcome could be. This is a song about keeping your expectations low because you know that you've had your heart broken in the past.”

She felt “the sounds of summer” flowing through her writing, and gradually collected an album’s worth of material imbued with a sense of romance, possibility and freedom. Something of a departure from the more traditional Americana sound of Andrews’ earlier releases, the album was co-produced by Sam Evian and recorded at Evian’s Flying Cloud Recordings studio in the Catskill Mountains.

“I've lost count of the albums that I've done but this is maybe my fourth or fifth album since my break through. Some people have called it like a love album but it seems to me more like a hesitation album. It's like I'm wanting to be in love but I'm afraid of being in love... or at least on the album! I had a very big relationship in my 20s and when you are with somebody for almost a decade, you just think you're going to spend your life with somebody and then you don't, and then you're thinking ‘Do I really want to go through all this again?’… or at least on the album!” Courtney is delighted to be heading back to the UK, a place she loves: “I've got to spend a lot of time in the UK in the past decade and I've always loved being there. I love the self-deprecating humour and I love the tea-time! And it really feels like I've developed a devoted fanbase over there as well which is lovely.”