Listen to “Make My Head Go” on Spotify’s New Music Friday Canada playlist!
Or hear it at Amazon Music Canada’s Fresh Folk & Acoustic playlist!
After establishing himself as a pop-friendly troubadour with his 2013 debut While It’s Still Light Out, Starts And Fits (Believe Digital), displays Andrew Austin‘s dynamic musical evolution over the past several years. The album grew out of Austin’s work as musical director on the Disney/Family Channel show Backstage, and found Andrew collaborating with award-winning producer James Bunton (Donovan Woods, Vivek Shraya) who also mixed Starts And Fits for maximum earworm-inducing effect.
“Coming out of two years of [Backstage], I was suddenly faced with the challenge of writing for myself again,” Andrew says. “One thing I knew was that I didn’t want to play guitar at that moment, I just wanted to go into a room with a piano or a synthesizer and make sounds that way. That became the foundation for this record, trying to step away from doing things like I’d always done them with a traditional singer/songwriter mindset.”
Andrew also revelled in the ability to write from an adult perspective again, and overall Starts And Fits is the sexiest collection he’s offered thus far. Moreover, as the process unfolded and Andrew felt like he was finding a new voice, he had to keep some of his best ideas for himself while continuing to co-write with other artists like Donovan Woods, Emm Gryner, and Bobby Bazini, as evidenced by another of the album’s highlights, “Church Music.”
What it all adds up to is Andrew Austin’s emergence as one of Canada’s most dynamic singer/songwriters. While chances are that up until now you’ve heard his music in one form or another, with Starts And Fits he is ready to join the ranks of contemporary pop’s biggest names.