Eric Andersen is a singer, songwriter and guitarist from New York City. He has been performing since the age of 12 and has released over 20 albums as well as written songs for other artists such as David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Prince.
Eric Andersen is a singer-songwriter from New York City. He was born in 1958 and began playing the guitar at the age of six. In 1980, he released his first album The Songs.
Since the 1960s, Eric Andersen has pursued a career as a folk singer/songwriter. Andersen’s work has a romantic/philosophical/poetic bent for the most part, rather than a socially aware one, in contrast to contemporaries like Tom Paxton and Phil Ochs, but one of his best-known songs, “Thirsty Boots,” is about the Freedom Riders in the early 1960s. (Judy Collins and others have recorded the song.)
Andersen started recording in 1965 with Today Is the Highway, after rising from the Northeast folk-club scene. The extremely lyrical “Violets of Dawn,” “Thirsty Boots,” and “I Shall Go Unbounded” were among the songs of his second album, ‘Bout Changes & Things,’ which featured some of his most polished writing. All were performed in Andersen’s flexible tenor (he subsequently shifted to a baritone) with fast, complex fingerpicking accompaniment. Andersen experimented with country, pop, and rock music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, eventually settling on an amalgamation by the time of his masterwork Blue River in 1972. This was also his most financially successful record, but Andersen, like his colleagues Leonard Cohen and Townes Van Zandt, was never popular enough. He recorded infrequently in the 1970s and 1980s while performing in folk clubs throughout the United States and, particularly, in Europe, where he settled. His subsequent work, such as 1989’s Ghosts Upon the Road, echoes his work from the 1960s while lamenting the decade. Andersen worked on Danko/Fjeld/Andersen with Rick Danko and Jonas Fjeld in the 1990s, as well as releasing a solo album, Memory of the Future, in 1998. He also supervised the publication of Stages: The Lost Album and a 1999 edition of Blue River. You can’t go back in time. Beat Avenue, released in 2003, was a large-scale double-CD, whereas The Street Was Always, released in 2004, was a more modest effort. There was a nostalgic look back at the music of the early to mid-’60s Greenwich Village scene in New York. Waves, released in 2005, was another album of covers, but this time with a wider range of songs. In May 2007, Andersen released Blue Rain, his first live album. The collection So Much on My Mind was released the same year. The collection was released on Columbia, Arista, and Warner Brothers, and included both archive songs and live performances.
Andersen continued to travel and participate in major cultural events. He won a “Andy” award for his performance at the Gershwin Hotel’s Andy Warhol Week Celebration in 2008 (Debbie Harry performed the same evening). Other winners were Lou Reed, Ultra Violet, Billy Name, and Holly Woodlawn. The next year, he appeared on Billy Bragg’s BBC show Greenwich Village Revisited, with Carolyn Hester, Roger McGuinn, and Judy Collins. Andersen also took part in the worldwide commemorations marking the 50th anniversary of William Burroughs’ release of Naked Lunch. In the book Naked Lunch At 50: The Anniversary Essays, edited by Oliver Harris and Ian MacFadyen and published by the Southern Illinois University Press, he contributed an article titled “The Danger Zone.”
Meyer Records released Andersen’s second live album, The Cologne Concert, in 2011. The performance included two new songs, “The Dance of Love and Death” and “Sinking Deeper Into You,” in addition to deep archive material. He joined the newly formed European Beat Studies Network in May 2012, under the direction of William S. Burroughs researcher Oliver Harris. Catherine Camus commissioned him to create fresh content for her father Albert Camus’ 100th birthday party in Aix en Provence, France, that autumn. Andersen wrote The Shadow and Light of Albert Camus, a song cycle that Meyer recorded and published in 2014.
On September 3, 2015, Andersen sang at a V.I.P. charity performance at Newstead Abbey Park’s Grand Hall, the poet Lord Byron’s ancestral house in Ravenshead, Nottingham, U.K. (in Sherwood Forest). Andersen performed music that he had composed in response to Byron’s verses, as well as completely new works in the poet’s rhyming style. Over the past two years, I wrote and developed this project. In the spring of 2017, Andersen recorded the songs and released them as Mingle with the Universe: The Worlds of Lord Byron.
Eric Andersen is a singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer. He was born on October 10th in 1946 in Portland, Oregon. His songs have been covered by artists such as Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. Reference: eric andersen wife.
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