Drawing by Andy Friedman - andyfriedmanillustration.com / andyfriedman.net



(Click drawing to enlarge)

Andy Friedman is a painter, songwriter, cartoonist, and freelance illustrator from New York. He’s one of the best arm-wrestlers I know. We first met years ago at the Café Carpe in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, when he came through town with Paul Curreri on the first of a series of cross-country car tours. It was called the ‘Make-A-Living’ tour, and I would eventually join them for a couple legs of it (an experience I eventually wrote into the song, “Tall Grass in Old Virginny”). I never learned why they called it that.

Andy hadn’t picked up the guitar or made a record yet then, but he and Paul would trade sets each night. That is, Paul would play his songs and then Andy would get up with a beer or a whiskey in his hand, and one of maybe forty-three different foam and mesh style baseball caps advertising a particular truck stop or cattle feed, and he would shows slides of his drawings and paintings while describing how the great country and blues players had influenced his work. Before he started writing songs, these were his songs, and he’d cue up a slide of a pencil drawing of lowering skies and explain that the drawing was his version of the Mississippi John Hurt song Payday. He’d say, “So long sunshine, I done all I can do, and I can’t get along with you. I’m gonna take you to your mama, come payday.”

I always loved his show.

A few years ago Andy decided he’d learn to play the guitar and start writing songs, something he achieved initially by reprising and restructuring the prosey wanderings that had accompanied the slides of his paintings and drawings. And he learned to sing, sort of. He hired a band and called it the Other Failures, a reference to his first book of art and prose, Drawings and Other Failures. Then he started writing new songs.

This past summer Andy came through town with the idea of having us pitch in some backing tracks for his second record, Taken Man. We sat in the dining room while he played us the roughs so that we could get acquainted with the tunes, and I was fairly shocked. Turned out it’s a great record, each song fully realized, wise and funny.

Taken Man came out this past fall on the Brooklyn’s City Salvage imprint and it’s become one of my favorites. There’s little point in trying to compare it to anything else, though I will say it reminds me of John Prine in how strangely apt the writing can be. Maybe John Prine meets Luke the Drifter in a bar, and they leave because of the smoking ban, joining forces with a bum on the street who talks a lot and used to know someone who played guitar. The main thing is conviction. Andy Friedman sings and plays with unmatched conviction.