A tour of Andy Logan’s basement reveals an obsession. Here's a guy who has a lot of amplifiers and a ton of pedals, most of which he built himself. It’s an interesting tour for gear heads.  And if you get him started on Music History…

Logan’s passion for gear and all things esoteric does not, however, distract him from his love of songwriting. Nine of his songs have reached the finals or semi-finals in international songwriting contests. “I bought THAT with Shadow on My Trail”, he says, pointing to another well used piece of gear.

Andy Logan grew up in the San Francisco bay area in the sixties and seventies, when the music scene was huge. There was a definitive “San Francisco Sound” that would later form the foundation for nearly every song Andy writes.

In the early eighties, when Logan was attending the University of California at Santa Barbara, he formed a psychedelic folk rock group, The Colours, who soon after, won a local battle of the bands. After moving to Los Angeles, changing some personnel and modernizing the sound a bit (at the request of their new management), the band became Little America, and was signed to Geffen records at the end of 1985. Little America made two albums, sold over a hundred thousand units, and landed a couple of top ten FM (AOR) radio hits, namely Walk on Fire. The group broke up in 1989, but has played a handful of reunion shows. Two laughably dated videos can be found on Youtube.

In 1993, Logan and extraordinary drummer/musician Kurt Custer (Little America, Steve Earle, Lynyrd Skynyrd) teamed up to record Custer and Logan, a groundbreaking piece of soulful Americana. 

In the next two decades Andy followed with solo projects: Last Dance on the Wild Frontier, 2002, Ride, 2006, Psychedelic Delta Moonshine, 2010, Transistors of Mercy 2016, an EP of mostly obscure sixties covers, Cover Garage, 2022, and the eclectic and powerful Prehistoric, 2022, all featuring exceptional tunes without filler.

Andy also published his first book in 2022, the comical Jimmy the Big Hat, which features a mobster with an oversized head.  It looks like a children’s book, but is decidedly not.

After going nearly a year without (his words) “being able to come up with jack”, the songs started to emerge again. Miss You All the Time was written as a tribute to Logan’s mother, who had just passed away, and for one of his heroes, David Crosby, who had also died earlier that year. He then penned Will You Remember Me after writing his mother’s obituary.

Then, when longtime friend and fellow musician, E.J. Wells, departed unexpectedly later in the year, Andy wrote a tribute in the musical style of E.J., incorporating some of the subtle dry wit that was so part of Wells’ personality.

Logan felt he had close to enough songs for an EP, but concluded that it needed another upbeat tune, and when he woke up in the middle of the night with this entire song playing in his head, he, after confirming that the melody he dreamed was not in fact another existing song, finished writing the lyrics to You Never Know with his wife, Alison.

The stunning and emotional Hail Mary was written days after a close family member almost lost her life battling addiction. Fellow Little America bandmate Mike Magrisi delivers a haunting piano refrain, creating a perfect coda for the song and the album.

Critical to the thread that binds this record together is the addition of the B-Bender, a device that can be fitted to a guitar that enables it to sound much like a pedal steel guitar. (The original version required extensive routing of the guitar body, and is what Clarence White (The Byrds) used and what Marty Stuart currently uses.)

 Andy, employing his newly outfitted “SG that thinks it’s a telecaster” was able to create game changing textures, and poignant moods.

Hail Mary, Andy Logan’s latest effort, shows him in fine form, and might arguably be his best work to date.  It’s meant to be listened to in order from start to finish, as he begins the album with a riff on his Stratocaster, then revisits the theme on the baritone guitar at the EP’s finale.