Jill Andrews

The New Jill Andrews
Ex-Everybodyfields Singer/Songwriter Delivers First Solo Record... and Baby
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Metro Pulse, November 2009

It’s only been about a year and a half since I last spoke with Knoxville’s resident nightingale Jill Andrews, but it’s safe to say we’ve both come a long way since then. For my part, I finally retired my favorite pair of sneakers and upgraded to a slightly more snug-fitting Converse brand. Not to be outdone, Jill countered by leaving her old band behind, getting married, having a baby, starting a solo project with a new crew of musicians, writing and producing her debut EP, and performing at the Tennessee Theatre with Willie Nelson. Hey, we all move at our own pace.

“I still feel like the same old girl,” says Andrews, 29, whose heartbreaking voice certainly ranks among the purest in the Americana genre. “Sometimes, I feel awfully young to have a baby and all these responsibilities. I was footloose and fancy-free not too long ago, you know? [laughs] But everything is so good right now. I’m really happy, my husband is really happy, the baby is really happy—it’s just been a great time.”

Andrews realizes that all this happiness stands in stark contrast to our previous interview, when she and ex-boyfriend Sam Quinn were still struggling to determine if their musical partnership as the acclaimed Everybodyfields could outlive their failed romantic one. This past summer, their best efforts finally hit the proverbial wall, as the band’s six-year run came to an official end.

“It wasn’t one particular thing really that ended it,” Andrews says. “It was a lot of little things built up over a long period of time. Finally, it was just like, ‘well, this thing has really kind of run its course. You’ve got your ideas and I’ve got mine. And we’ve both got our music, so let’s just do our own thing.’”

By no coincidence, the sad demise of the Everybodyfields didn’t take long to sprout silver linings, as both Quinn (with his new band Japan Ten) and Andrews have moved on gracefully and creatively with their careers. In Jill’s case, marriage and motherhood never threatened to put her music on ice. In fact, they only seemed to encourage her progression, as she assembled a new band of first class Knoxville musicians (including Everybodyfields holdover Josh Oliver on keys) and headed to Scott Minor’s Elkgang studio to record her self-titled debut EP, which she released independently last month.

The six tracks on the record (most of which were written pre-baby) don’t showcase a drastic new direction so much as a steady, continuing glide toward greater things, with plenty of the sadness and vulnerability that made Andrews’ Everybodyfields contributions so affecting. Standout track “A Way Out,” for example, was penned for an old friend battling with drug addiction, while the gorgeous “These Words” tugs at broken heart strings as effectively as any ballad you’ll hear this year. As for learning to write from the “happier place” that is now her life, Andrews says it’s a work in progress, like many things.

“Yeah, I think it’s a bit of a new challenge for me, but it’s also a challenge just to find times to write at all, since most of my time is taken up with Nico (her son). I just have to be much more organized, which is something I’ve always been bad about in the past. I’ve always lived pretty haphazardly from one moment to the next. And with him, well, I’ve certainly had to change that.”

Not surprisingly, changes have come down on the tour-scheduling front, as well.

“So far we’ve mostly just done weekend runs, just to kind of see how it will be,” Andrews says. “But one thing I think we’ve realized is that we’re never going to know how it’s going to be [laughs]. Every venue is different, every club owner is different, every city is different. And you know, when it’s just you and a band, that’s one thing. But when it’s you and a band and a little baby… it just gets a lot more complicated.”

The good news for Nico and his mom is that they needn’t go too far from home to play a great show. Earlier this month, Andrews nabbed a spot performing at the Tennessee Theatre as part of Willie Nelson’s big family show. With little hesitation, she calls it the “highlight of my whole musical career,” although—in a broader sense-- it probably only ranks as the third or fourth most exciting thing she did in 2009.

“When they asked me to do it, anything I had planned for that night—which was nothing anyway--- went right out the window. I said, ‘yeah, I think I can fit that into my schedule.’ [laughs] I mean, first of all, it’s Willie Nelson! But really, the most incredible thing to me was singing in the Tennessee Theatre—hearing my voice bounce off the rafters. It was just an amazing experience.”

The audience likely would say the same.

The Everybodyfields (2)

Sweeping Out the Ashes
The Everybodyfields Break Up, Get Back Together, Wind Up In Knoxville
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Metro Pulse, June 2008



For those keeping score at home, you can officially call the Everybodyfields a “Knoxville band” now. The alt-country outfit’s sterling tag-team of Sam Quinn and Jill Andrews have always felt like locals anyway, but it took a hop and a skip migration from Johnson City to make their Knoxvilization complete. So far, it’s a regional responsibility that the Everybodyfields are carrying with pride, even when they take their sweet-heart-broken show on the road.

“East Tennessee over the rest of Tennessee, any day of the week,” says Quinn, who often makes similar pronouncements in his stage banter. “It’s an easier way of saying we’re not from Nashville.”

Admittedly, that distinction became a bit tougher to make after the Everybodyfields trekked out to the aforementioned city out West to record their third album, 2007’s Nothing Is Okay.

“I fought that one tooth and nail, and I completely lost out in a democratic type of situation,” Quinn says. “The studio was great, don’t get me wrong. But all the nights in Nashville were spent getting, I don’t know, Nashville-ized-- paying way too much for everything, spending fifty bucks a night just to realize you’re not having that great of a time. I’ll take Knoxville.”

Though she enjoyed the Nashville experience, Jill Andrews essentially agrees. “The key difference I see is that we’re not under a lot of weird industry pressure in Knoxville,” she says. “When we play around East Tennessee, it’s partly to make a living, but it’s also for fun. I’d probably die if I moved to Nashville.”

Unfortunately, Knoxville pride is one of the few topics Quinn and Andrews can safely agree upon these days. Even as Nothing Is Okay earned the Everybodyfields their widest acclaim to date, the album’s subject matter— the end of Quinn and Andrews’ romantic relationship—made the band’s increasing success somewhat bittersweet. It’s a dark chapter that the talented duo are slowly starting to put behind them, but as they both revealed in these separate interviews, plenty of pain still lingers.

“Yeah, man, it was a real pain in the ass,” Quinn says. “And I hope I don’t have to go through anything like that again. It’s not easy when there’s no separation between your personal life and your business life—not that I’m belly aching. But if Jill and I weren’t in a band together, we probably wouldn’t talk for five years or something. We’re just trying to get things in our lives more straight where we can figure this out a little more without it having to be so hard.”

“It’s not steady,” Andrews admits with a thoughtful laugh. “Our personal and musical relationships have been very unsteady. But we love each other in our own way. I have a lot of respect for Sam-- his intellect and his musicianship. I would say he has the same for me. It’s just an every day sort of conscious decision to say, ‘okay, we can do this together.’ That’s the way it is in a lot of business relationships, I’m sure.”

For a while, it looked as though Quinn and Andrews’ break-up would spell the end of the Everybodyfields, as well. Their decision to carry on hinged on their ability to translate their heartache into what they do best together—making music. Nothing Is Okay was their band-saving experiment—a unique record in which both sides of a break-up are given the opportunity to tell their story, while harmonizing with the very person about whom they’re singing.

“I think the album just kind of made itself, through the course of our lives,” Andrews says. “We were writing the songs separately, but because we were addressing the same situation, it almost became like a call and response record. Sam and I, musically, are very entwined. So even without hearing any of what he was writing, I knew what it would be. And I think he was thinking the same thing about what I was writing. We knew that it would work together. And when we came to the table with everything, it flowed really well.”

“Yeah, I can’t really believe it got done,” Quinn chuckles. “When I held the first copy in my hands, I just thought, ‘I can’t believe it’s finished.’”

In the end, the most romantic part of the Everybodyfields story would appear to be the honesty and persistence of the band’s music, rather than the personal relationship of its two singer/songwriters. Still, the improbable cohesiveness of Nothing Is Okay—along with the continuing harmonic perfection of the band’s live shows-- leaves little doubt that Andrews and Quinn, in some way at least, were meant for each other.

“The first song Jill and I ever sang together was ‘We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning,’ the Gram (Parsons) and Emmylou (Harris) tune,” Quinn recalls. “Just the way a guy and a girl’s voice can fit together—it can make a good song great and a sad song sadder. It happened with Jill so early on, where I realized, ‘oh shit, I don’t have to tell this girl anything!’ I just have to show her a song and she’s just right on it. It’s still pretty great.”

The Everybodyfields

Heartbreak in Harmony
The Everybodyfields Make Breaking Up Sound Beautiful
By Andrew Clayman
Published (with edits) in The Cleveland Scene (Village Voice), May 2008

See Alternate Everybodyfields Feature in the Knoxville Metro Pulse



Their story may have started out like a fairy tale, but for Sam Quinn and Jill Andrews, a sad country ballad always seemed more suitable.

As the two singer/songwriters for acclaimed Knoxville alt-country act The Everybodyfields, Quinn and Andrews are currently touring behind one of the more intriguing and heartbreakingly honest breakup albums in recent memory. With an appropriate title to boot, Nothing Is Okay offers the rare opportunity to hear both sides of a failed relationship tell their story, often in ironically perfect harmony. For both Quinn and Andrews-- interviewed separately for this story-- the album was a chance to come to terms with their past, while still paving the way for their band’s future.

“I think the album just kind of made itself, through the course of our lives,” says Andrews. She is the epitome of the Southern belle—sweet-voiced and painfully pretty.

“It was a real pain in the ass,” counters Quinn. He has the laid back look of a hacky-sack enthusiast, complete with a pair of muttonchops straight from Neil Young’s storage closet. “Everything was kind of falling apart there for a while,” he continues. “We had come so far with this thing, and now it was almost like seeing your child in intensive care, and everyone wants to pull the plug.”

According to Quinn, the Everybodyfields finally came to the fork in the road while on their way to a gig in Boone, NC, in 2006. Broken up and barely on speaking terms, Quinn and Andrews had to decide if the end of their personal relationship would mean the end of their musical partnership, as well.

“On that car ride, instead of deciding to break up the entire band and trash our plans, we decided to carry on,” Quinn says. “Later, I approached Jill and said, ‘Look, we need to make this record. How about we call it Nothing Is Okay, and just make it about these problems?’ The idea was for Jill to take her tunes and me to take mine, and just to do whatever we wanted.”

Andrews agreed to give the concept a shot, and after a series of tumultuous sessions in Nashville, Nothing Is Okay finally emerged as the band’s surprisingly cohesive and intensely heartbreaking third album in August of 2007.

“We were writing the songs separately,” Andrews says, “but I think we knew that it would work together in the end. Sam and I, musically, are very, very entwined. We like a lot of the same stuff. We’re influenced by a lot of the same stuff. So, without hearing any of what he was writing, I knew what it would be. And I think he was thinking the same thing about what I was writing.”

This deep understanding of one another seemed to be present from the moment Quinn and Andrews met. It was 1999, and they were 19 year-old counselors at a Methodist summer camp in the Smoky Mountains. When it came time for the duo to sing together around the obligatory campfire, something just clicked.

“It happened with Jill so early on,” Quinn recalls. “I realized, ‘oh shit, I don’t have to tell this girl anything!’ I just have to show her a song and she’s right on it. It was pretty amazing.”

“The first time we really got together, we sang a Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris duet,” says Andrews.

Quinn remembers that it was “We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning.”

“Just the way a guy and a girl’s voice can fit together,” he says, “it can make something really great. When you throw a little twang into it, you can make a sad song with one person singing it a whole lot sadder with two people singing harmonies.”

With a mutual love for cerebral country performers like Gillian Welch, the Jayhawks, and eventually, each other, Quinn and Andrews soon formed The Everybodyfields, a name borrowed from Quinn’s childhood moniker for his backyard (a la the “Hundred Acre Wood” in Winnie the Pooh). Based out of Johnson City, TN, the band released a pair of well-received records in 2004 and 2005, and was soon heralded as one of the top new acts in “alt-country”— a vague classification that’s been known to annoy some musicians.

“I actually like the phrase ‘alt-country,’ myself,” Andrews says. “A lot of people these days are just turned off by the term ‘country,’ period. Adding the ‘alt’ kind of gives those people an excuse to be like, ‘oh, maybe this isn’t so bad,’” she laughs.

“It doesn’t mean much to me,” Quinn says. “I’d just call it honest music.”

Honesty is certainly at the core of Nothing Is Okay, an album bursting at the seams with self-reflection, regret, and some acceptance for good measure. Eerily, the subject of each song is also singing backup—whether it’s Andrews on Quinn’s “Don’t Turn Around” or vise versa on “Wasted Time.”

“Because we were writing about the same situation, it’s kind of like a call and response album,” Andrews says.

“It was just a real hard record to make,” adds Quinn. “If Jill and I weren’t in a band together, we probably wouldn’t talk for five years or something. So, just out of necessity, you kind of have to look at that person as not being the same person she used to be—sort of like Anakin Skywalker had to be killed off,” he laughs. “You know, Jill is mostly machine now.”

Andrews doesn’t exactly concede that point. “I don’t know if you’ve ever broken up with somebody who you then had to be around every day—very, very difficult,” she says. “But that’s what we had to do to keep the band together. And now, it seems like things are finally working themselves out.”

“We’re just trying to get things in our lives more straight, where we can figure this out a little more without it having to be so hard,” Quinn says. “It seems the pleasures of life go a lot quicker than the lingering hardships. But I still think there’s better stuff ahead for this outfit.”

“I have a lot of respect for Sam,” Andrews says. “I would say he has the same for me. It’s just an every day sort of conscious decision to say, okay, we can still do this together.”