Posted on: April 4, 2012 Posted by: James McQuiston Comments: 0

Andy The Doorbum is the moniker of Andy Fenstermaker, who earned his handle as the 7-night-a-week bouncer at the famously seedy Milestone Club in Charlotte NC. And like the dirty, boarded-up, crack-addled population surrounding the Milestore Club, such is the imaginative landscape of Andy the Doorbum’s music. Tales of gravediggers, fratricide, and familial failings fill his new, 4th LP entitled “The Man Killed the Bird, and With the Bird the Song, and With the Song, Himself,” which will be coming out April, 17th 2012 on Slanty Shanty and Afterbirth Casserole Records.

 

Andy “The Doorbum” Fenstermaker was born in the Pennsylvania town of Titusville, tucked away in the northwest corner of the state. It’s the birthplace of the oil industry, and the place where, years later, his father would add to his cumulative jail time by drunk-driving his pickup truck into town hall. Shortly after his birth, Andy’s family loaded up everything they could carry into their ’52 International pickup truck and moved to Gaston county N.C. A childhood spent bouncing back-and-forth between the Alleghenies and the Appalachians has given Fenstermaker a wealth of stories centered around drugs, death, history, religion, and a pantheon of morally ambiguous characters to inhabit them.

 

Andy the Doorbum’s music has drawn comparisons to post-apocalyptic Johnny Cash, a trucker-speed fueled Tom Waits, or a desperately hopeless William Elliot Whitmore. Either way you look at it, it’s a slice of dark southern Americana that lingers ominously like confederate money, is as dirty as a moonshine still, and has the ability to create unease like a snake handling ritual.

 

Currently, Andy “The Doorbum” Fenstermaker lives outside of Charlotte, NC where he still works at the Milestone Club. A tour is in the works, but if you ask Fenstermaker, his biggest ambition is to just keep writing and recording. “The only success I ultimately care to attain is of artistic integrity,” he says, “If art pours out of you, it’s all you know – you can’t compromise that and remain genuine. The best thing I have to offer as a human being is doing my art.”

 

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Andy The Doorbum

“The Man Killed the Bird, and With the Bird, the Song, and With the Song, Himself” LP

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