Personal history
Eric Andersen's grandfather emigrated from Norway.[2] Eric Andersen was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Snyder, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. Elvis Presley made an impression on him when 15-year-old Andersen saw him perform.[3] He moved to Boston and then San Francisco, where he met Tom Paxton, finally settling in New York City at the height of the Greenwich Village folk movement.[4]
Andersen was at one point married to former Cambridge folksinger Debbie Green,[5] who contributed guitar, piano, and backing vocal performances to various records Andersen released between 1965 and 1975. He was a resident of Woodstock, New York, between 1975 and 1983. He then moved to Oslo, Norway, and maintained a residence in New York City.[6] He was cohabiting and has four children with the Norwegian visual artist Unni Askeland.[7] He currently lives in the Netherlands.
He married Dutch social scientist and singer Inge Andersen in 2006. He has a daughter Sari (with Debbie Green), who contributed backing vocal performances to his Memory of the Future album.
In 2022, Andersen was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Hobart and William Smith Colleges.[8]
Musical career
1964–1969: Folk breakthrough
In the early 1960s, Andersen was part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in New York City.[1] His best-known songs from the 1960s folk era are "Violets of Dawn", "Come to My Bedside", and "Thirsty Boots" (the latter recorded by Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, and John Denver amongst others).[9]
In 1964, Andersen made his debut at Gerdes Folk City in a live audition for Vanguard Records. In 1965 he released his first Vanguard album Today Is the Highway.[2] In 1966 he made his Newport Folk Festival debut. The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein was in the process of becoming his manager when he died.[3] Joni Mitchell cites Andersen as the source of her open tunings.
1970s: Singer-songwriter era
Andersen took part in the Festival Express tour across Canada in 1970 with the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band, Delaney Bramlett and others.
Andersen signed with Columbia in 1972 and issued his most commercially successful album, Blue River, on that label. From that album, the song "Is It Really Love At All?" is the most popular.[10] The master tapes of his follow-up album Stages were lost (until 1989) before the album could be released, resulting in the loss of much of the momentum he had gained with Blue River.[1]
Andersen parted ways with Columbia and recorded sporadically for a number of labels throughout the remainder of the 1970s and into the early 1980s. In 1975 he performed with Arlen Roth at the opening show of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue at Gerde's Folk City and again in Niagara Falls.
In the late 1970s, Andersen was also a member of the Woodstock Mountains Revue, a folk group that also featured Artie Traum, Happy Traum and John Sebastian.[11]
1980s: Europe
Andersen fell into obscurity for a number of years for audiences in United States. After moving to Europe, he recorded three albums, including Midnight Son, Tight in the Night and Istanbul. Andersen established his own company, Wind and Sand Records, to sell his music through mail order.[2][12]
Andersen reemerged in 1989 with a new album, Ghosts Upon the Road. Though the album did only modestly well, it was widely praised and placed on a number of critics' year-end "best of" lists.[3] The title track was a 10 1/2-minute autobiographical song that Andersen wrote about when he lived in Beacon Hill, Boston, and moved to New York City in 1964.[6]
Stages: The Lost Album
The Stages tapes were found nearly two decades after they had been lost. Forty boxes consisting of the original master tapes were found October 1989 in the vaults at Columbia Records in New York. The album was recorded after Blue River and featured guest artists Leon Russell, Joan Baez and Dan Fogelberg, among others.[13] It was issued in 1991 as Stages: The Lost Album.[14]
1990s: Danko/Fjeld/Andersen
At this point in his career, Andersen was living in Oslo, Norway, and, in the early 1990s, he joined the trio Danko/Fjeld/Andersen, with Rick Danko (the Band) and the Norwegian singer-songwriter Jonas Fjeld. The trio recorded three albums and performed together for nine years.[15][16]
1998–present: Late solo work
In 1998, Andersen released his first solo album in a decade, Memory of the Future. Praised as "dreamy and introspective", the album was followed two years later by You Can't Relive The Past, which included original blues numbers as well as a selection of songs co-written with Townes Van Zandt.
A double album, Beat Avenue, followed in 2003. Besides mostly rock-dominated ballads, the album's 26-minute title track is a jazzy beat poem relating his experiences among San Francisco's beat community of artists on the day of President John F. Kennedy's assassination.
Andersen's next albums, The Street Was Always There (2004) and Waves (2005), were both produced by multi-instrumentalist Robert Aaron. In addition to covers of his own songs, the albums featured new versions of classics by his sixties contemporaries and friends, including David Blue, Bob Dylan, Richard Fariña, Tim Hardin, Peter La Farge, Fred Neil, Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Paul Siebel, Patrick Sky, Tom Paxton, John Sebastian, Happy Traum, Lou Reed, and Tom Rush. His next album, Blue Rain, released in 2007, was his first live album. It was recorded in Norway and contains a blend of blues, jazz and folk.
In 2011, Andersen released his second live album, The Cologne Concert, with it:Michele Gazich (Mary Gauthier, Mark Olson) on violin and Inge Andersen (his wife) on backing vocals.
In 2013, Andersen performed in Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation,[17] a feature-length documentary about the Greenwich Village music scene, which was issued on DVD in November.
In August 2014, Andersen released a limited-edition double 10" vinyl record, "Shadow and Light of Albert Camus", featuring it:Michele Gazich on violin and piano, with cover design paintings of de:Oliver Jordan.
In April 2017, Andersen phoned Joni Mitchell, who was at home recovering from a serious long-term illness, and suggested bringing his band to her house for some music-making. (Andersen was the guitarist who had taught Mitchell open-G tuning.) Mitchell was greatly cheered by having music in her home and in her life again, and as a result of Andersen's visit was inspired to start hosting regular music sessions, which became known as "Joni Jams". The music sessions assisted her recovery, and she was able to return to live performance in 2022.[18]
In May 2017, Andersen released his album Mingle with the Universe: The Worlds of Lord Byron, featuring Inge Andersen (backing vocals), it:Michele Gazich (violin), Giorgio Curcettie (oud, bass, guitar), Cheryl Prashker (percussion) and Paul Zoontjes (aka nl:Simon Keats, piano) with cover design paintings of de:Oliver Jordan. In December 2017, the album Silent Angel: The Fire and Ashes of Heinrich Böll was released celebrating the centenary of the writer Heinrich Böll's birth.
In March 2018, Sony/Legacy Recordings issued The Essential Eric Andersen, a 42-track double CD release covering fifty years of his recorded history from Today is the Highway on to The Cologne Concert album and unreleased New York recordings.
A documentary about Eric Andersen, entitled The Songpoet, premiered at The Copenhagen Music Film Festival on September 13, 2019. Set against the cultural landscapes of his 50-year artistic journey, the film depicts an intimate portrait of Andersen—writing, recording, and performing today and reflecting on his life's work. The film was produced by Toward Castle Films and Skipping Stone Pictures. Beginning in April 2021 The Songpoet was made available for TV broadcast in the United States by American Public Television,[19] and a free stream of the full documentary became available at the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) website.[20]
In June 2020, Y&T Music issued Woodstock under the Stars, a collection featuring a 36-track triple CD drawn from concerts, a webcast and studio sessions recorded between 1991 and 2011. The performances feature special guests Rick Danko, John Sebastian, Garth Hudson, Eric Bazilian, Happy Traum, Artie Traum, Inge Andersen (singer-songwriter, Eric Andersen's wife and harmony singer), Joe Flood, Jonas Fjeld, Gary Burke and Robert Aaron) with cover design paintings of de:Oliver Jordan.
In October 2022, Y&T Music issued Tribute To A Songpoet: Songs of Eric Andersen, a collection of 42 songs on a triple CD with a cover design painting of de:Oliver Jordan featuring new (and some vintage) recordings and interpretations of his songs by an eclectic group of artists with musical and personal connections to him. The artists include Bob Dylan, Lucy Kaplansky, Albert Lee, Scarlet Rivera, Willie Nile, Elliott Murphy, Eric Bazilian, Larry Campbell, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Janis Ian, Robert Aaron, Steve Addabbo, John Gorka, Happy Traum, Amy Helm, Linda Ronstadt, Lenny Kaye, Rick Danko and many others.
In February 2023, Appaloosa Records issued Foolish Like the Flowers, a live album recorded in Spaziomusica, Italy featuring Scarlet Rivera on violin, Paolo Ercoli on dobro,Cheryl Prashker on percussion and Inge Andersen on backing vocals.
Andersen has completed the recording of another new album, Dance of Love and Death. The album was co-produced, recorded and mixed by Steve Addabbo. Other musicians who performed on the album include Lenny Kaye, Larry Campbell, Steve Addabbo, Robert Aaron, it:Michele Gazich, Richard Barone, and Inge Andersen. The record is expected to be released soon.
