Li'l Andy with String Quartet

Li'l Andy with String Quartet — an online concert film for Suoni per il popolo

We made something beautiful for you this week.

Me and the largest ensemble of musicians I've ever played with made a gorgeous online concert for Montreal's renowned avant-garde music festival, Suoni per il popolo.

And it's airing in its gorgeous multi-camera entirety this Thursday, April 8 at 8pm at suoniperilpopolo.org/ You can watch it after that at the Archive section here

We're calling it Li'l Andy with String Quartet — a concert featuring my regular band PLUS background singers Katie Moore and Dara Weiss AND a string quartet accompanying all of us, playing lush string arrangements to a bunch of my songs.

That's eleven musicians, if you're counting. Think of it as a country & western chamber orchestra. Pedal-steel, twangy guitars, angelic voices, violins, violas, cellos, drums and two basses.

This concert almost didn't happen. Or rather, it was supposed to happen in June of 2020. And then, for reasons we don't even need to mention anymore because they have become the very wallpaper of our lives, it was cancelled. Then it was rescheduled for September 2020, then to January 2021. And now here we are in spring.

Along the way, I hired genius composer/virtuoso violinist Joshua Zubot to compose string arrangements and listened with my jaw dropped at the demos he sent me.

And I kept writing new songs. They became part of the set.

And one of them, which I started in the depressing waiting area of LaGuardia Airport — where I was one of hundreds of people in a blue medical face mask and saw a thermometer gun aimed at someone's forehead for the first time — became what I think is maybe my best song. It’s called “The Heart of the Machine” and is the closing song of our set.

Being together in one room with ten other musicians was an absolute joy to me. After all this waiting. All this time.

If you'd like to watch it, the concert will be airing here, for free, on Thursday, April 8th: https://suoniperilpopolo.org/ After that you can find it in the Archive section of the same site.

I think that joy and relief will translate directly on-screen. If something as elemental as joy can ever exist on a screen. The greater joy will come when I see all of you again at a show, or after the show, in person, in the real world.

Until then, I remain, your humble servant,

Li'l Andy