Eric Andersen

Did You Know?

• Andersen wrote an essay titled "My Beat Journal" for the Rolling Stone Book of the Beats in 1999.
• He contributed an essay called "The Danger Zone" to the volume Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays.
• He wrote the liner notes for The Essential Pete Seeger for Sony/Legacy Records in 2013.

Personal history

Andersen's grandfather emigrated from Norway. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Snyder, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. At age fifteen, Elvis Presley made an impression on him. He moved to Boston, then San Francisco, where he met Tom Paxton, and finally settled in New York City during the Greenwich Village folk movement. He was married to former Cambridge folksinger Debbie Green, who contributed to his records between 1965 and 1975. He lived in Woodstock, New York, from 1975 to 1983, then moved to Oslo, Norway, while maintaining a New York residence. He cohabited with Norwegian visual artist Unni Askeland and has four children with her. He married Dutch social scientist and singer Inge Andersen in 2006 and currently lives in the Netherlands.

Musical career

Eric Andersen got his start in the early 1960s as part of the Greenwich Village folk scene. His best-known songs from that period are "Violets of Dawn," "Come to My Bedside," and "Thirsty Boots," the last of which was covered by Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, and John Denver. In 1964, he auditioned live at Gerdes Folk City for Vanguard Records, and his first Vanguard album, Today Is the Highway, came out the following year. He played the Newport Folk Festival for the first time in 1966. Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, was in the process of becoming Andersen's manager when Epstein died. Joni Mitchell has said Andersen is the reason she started using open tunings. In 1970, he joined the Festival Express train tour across Canada alongside the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and the Band, among others. He signed with Columbia in 1972 and released his most commercially successful album, Blue River, whose standout track is "Is It Really Love At All?" The master tapes for his next album, Stages, went missing until 1989, which stalled his momentum. After leaving Columbia, he recorded only occasionally for various labels through the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1975, he performed with Arlen Roth at the opening show of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue. Later in the decade, he was part of the Woodstock Mountains Revue. He moved to Europe, where he made three albums and started his own label, Wind and Sand Records, to sell his music by mail order. He resurfaced in 1989 with Ghosts Upon the Road, a critically praised album whose title track is a ten-and-a-half-minute autobiographical song about living in Beacon Hill, Boston, and moving to New York City in 1964.

Musical legacy

Over his career, Andersen has issued more than thirty albums, with contributions from Joan Baez, Dan Fogelberg, Al Kooper, Willie Nile, Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, Leon Russell, Richard Thompson, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, and many others. His songs have been recorded internationally by artists including the Blues Project, Johnny Cash, Judy Collins, Peter, Paul & Mary, John Denver, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, Gillian Welch, and Pete Seeger. Richard Harrington of The Washington Post wrote that no other songwriter of his generation better explored the insistence of love.

Filmography and DVD appearances

In 1965, Andersen starred in the Andy Warhol movie Space, in which he sang. He appeared in the Les Blank documentary A Poem is a Naked Person, filmed over three years in the life of Leon Russell; the film was released in 2015 after being unreleased for forty years. In 1984 he appeared in the documentary Chords of Fame about Phil Ochs, singing Ochs's song "When I'm Gone". He wrote original music for the 1985 film Istanbul. A documentary about his career, The Songpoet, began production in 2011 and premiered at the Copenhagen Music Film Festival on September 13, 2019. He appears on DVD releases including Judy Collins Wildflower Festival, Festival Express, and Greenwich Village: Music that defined a generation.