About the Artist
The Drews’ brand of cowpunk folk is a little brown jug of homemade brew, distilled from a whole lot of living for the sole purpose of grinning. The best jokes are the ones no one else gets. The Drews take sex, drugs, loneliness, and escapism, and churn it into new kind of folk music – alienation as comic relief. The well-worn voice of Andrew DiMartino is like your favorite old pair of boots that have taken you too many places for you to ever stop wearing them – from the Great Folk Scare to the Summer of Love to the Texas oil field to the horse ranch to the high iron, from the white lines to the dark alleys, back to the future and down to the subatomic. He started playing guitar for the same reason a lot of young adolescent males did – to get laid – and he’s been trying to quit ever since (playing guitar, that is). However, some things are best left to continue. The juxtaposition of rhythm and melody from Jen’s bass sums her up better than words ever could. She started out with piano lessons at age 9, like many daughters of Southern middle-class families, but she soon moved on to sex, drugs, metaphysics, art, theatre, and back to her roots, where the country folks get together and play on the back porch on a Sunday afternoon. She picked up bongos, congas, and finally bass, her resonant instrument, along the way. Andrew heard Jen playing bongos on the beach one sunny Seattle day in 1992, and the pair soon began playing and living together. Their songwriting style is much like passing notes in class – one idea leads to another until someone gets caught, or everyone starts laughing too hard. They have been passing notes for over 11 years, and they are still finding things to write (and laugh) about.
