Singer-Songwriter, Andy Newton
Andy Newton is a singer-songwriter. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Andy first began to compose tunes in college as a means, in the great tradition of songwriters before him, to whine about girls. Now whining about girls is just one of a multitude of themes in Andy’s work.
Andy grew up in a manner similar to that of many children: listening to the music imposed on him by his parents. In his case, this came in the form of KFRC, the local radio station that, with every song it played, lived up to its boastful claim, “That means Oldies,” packing the airwaves with The Supremes, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, The Beatles, The Zombies, The Mamas and the Papas, The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Beach Boys, Frankie Lymon, and Roy Orbison, just to name a few. Andy would find himself coming back to this staggering list of icons time and again in the years to follow.
While an undergraduate at Brown University, Andy – experiencing first crushes, first heartbreaks, first mad, stoned crazes – would take to spending odd hours locked in his dorm room, picking and scribbling out songs one word and one chord at a time. On a whim, he began to study musical theatre songwriting. He learned to develop voice and narrative in a track, to better join music and lyrics, and how –as his teacher Andy Hertz put it – not to resort to “throwaway rhymes ”.
After earning his Master’s degree in Italian literature from UCLA, Andy moved to the Boston area, where he currently resides.