Here are two reviews that really capture the feeling behind my new album, Only Mirrors!

Enjoy! Drew

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All Music Guide.com

Review by Matt Collar

Singer/songwriter Drew Andrews' debut solo effort Only Mirrors is a hauntingly reflective and guttingly bittersweet album. Acoustic at the core, Andrews' sound is nonetheless layered with strings, xylophone, vocal harmonies, and various electric instruments. Combined with Andrews soft burnished croon, the result brings to mind a mix of the organic '70s soft rock of Bread and moody '80s college rock of the Smiths. In that sense, Andrews also draws nice comparisons to such contemporaries as journeyman Canadian bard Ron Sexsmith and the sympathetically minded Brit Ed Harcourt. Tracks like the delicately ominous title cut, the measured midtempo ballad "I Could Write a Book," and the meditative and circular "Counterfeit" with their swirling arpeggios of doubt and ennui are perfect bundles of indie-chamber pop and work well as soundtracks to dorm room dramas and various scenes of personal regret. Similarly, the more folk-inflected moments like the supple "Angeli" and gently rambling "Hospitals Again" are beautifully simple and deftly cinematic tracks that find Andrews moving into ever more varied and even slightly psychedelic soundscapes. Primarily, while Andrews has an obvious knack for Baroque and expertly orchestrated Beatlesque pop, he never over does it, and instead has crafted a subtle, tasteful, and deeply moving album. Only Mirrors is the kind of debut that sinks into your soul and catches you staring off into space. As the title implies, Andrews' talent is no smoke and only mirrors.

***

Drew Andrews
Only Mirrors
(Minty Fresh)
*8.0*

Goes well with: The Postal Service, The Album Leaf, Thom Yorke

To paraphrase Lisa Stansfield, Drew Andrews has been around the world, and he can't find his baby. For the last five years, the one-time Via Satellite frontman has been continent-hopping with Jimmy LaValle as a touring member of The Album Leaf. It's easy to see the songs on Andrews' long-belated debut album, Only Mirrors, coming from those travels. They reek of lonely, restless nights in the back of tour buses or strange hotel rooms, but lucky for us, he found a way to channel the restlessness into a lush suite of songs that compare with anything else he's worked on.

The album opens like a great, lost Simon and Garfunkel side with Andrews plucking forlorn acoustic blues, segueing into the lush "I Could Write a Book." He walks the same Clinton Street on "Angeli" that Leonard Cohen did on "Famous Blue Raincoat" and searches for love and light in the desert on "I Will, You Won't." It all adds up to a local album that doesn't feel at home at all.
Whether he intended to or not, Andrews has made an album in the vein of Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Beck's Sea Change. And where Mirrors might not overtly be about heartbreak, its lack of subjective clarity is unmistakably its greatest strength. Not lost, not fully destined, Andrews knows that the only things keeping him from the past are the headlights in front of him.
—Seth Combs/San Diego Citybeat