Andrew Combs confirms Europe tour for August / September

Though born and raised in Dallas, Texas, Nashville-based singer-songwriter and artist Andrew Combs can’t say for certain he identifies with any one place in particular. Through years of drawing on ethereal and visceral beauty wherever he can find it, his work is more accurately a measured synthesis of a wide array of “places”: the literal and the figurative, those he has been to and others he has yet to see. His latest full-length album, Sundays, is reflective of those varied places that inform Combs’ creative work.

Written on the heels of a mental breakdown Combs had at Christmas of 2020—amid the long, monotonous grind of an ongoing global pandemic—Sundays came together in Nashville in early 2021. In the wake of this debilitating psychological crack-up, Combs turned to the practice of transcendental meditation to find balance and to, in the words of surrealist director David Lynch, “catch the big fish”. Alongside his collaborators, Jordan Lehning and Dominic Billet, Combs would go into the studio every Sunday, the goal being to capture a song he had penned the previous week as he plumbed the depths of his own heart and mind.

And from the album’s first notes, one does get the feeling of a lazy Sunday: the pace loping along for several measures, creating the sensation of a slow, carefree morning—up until the point it suddenly doesn’t seem so serene. Through the course of the 11-song collection, Sundays manages to capture that sense of being mentally and emotionally unmoored, the anxious tension of falling apart, of being incapacitated and grasping at whatever one can hold onto for equilibrium. 

As for instrumentation, the often bleak and completely minimal approach on Combs’ newest record lies in stark contrast to his earlier work. Going away from the more traditional roots arrangements on his albums All These Dreams and Canyons of my Mind, Sundays leans away from the more linear Americana-inflected instrumentation and structure and into darker and more sparse territory. Instead of lush strings and longing pedal steel behind fingerpicked acoustic guitar, we find a lonely, thumb-strummed electric being colored by brooding woodwinds—yielding a blend of hopeful lift, and a somberness that channels the dark tension of a film noir detective show.

In August / September we're welcoming Andrew Combs back to European shores:

22/08: Guildford, UK - The Keep
23/08: Winchester, UK - The Railway Inn
25/08: Salitaire, UK - The Live Room
27/08: Chester, UK - St Mary's Creative Space
28/08: Dublin, IRL - Workmans Cellar
29/08: Kilkenny, IRL - Cleere's
30/08: Belfast, UK - Deer's Head
31/08: Paisley, UK - Mill Town Music Festival
01/09: Edinburgh, UK - Sneaky Pete's
03/09: London, UK - The Green Note
05/09: Rotterdam, NL - De Doelen
06/09: Arnhem, NL - Luxor Live
07/09: Deventer, NL - Burgerweeshuis
08/09: Amsterdam, NL - Paradiso
09/09: Eindhoven, NL - Americana Mondays