Monday 05th May 2025
Location: Billy Byrnes, 39 John Street Upper, Kilkenny, R95 K091
Dream Pictures, the sixth album from songwriter Andrew Combs, is a dreamy, dusky record for the quiet hours that bring each day to a close.

It was during those nightly stretches of solitude, after his children had gone to bed, that Combs penned the record’s 12 songs. “That’s the best time for me to do anything creative,” says the Nashville resident, who’s become a fixture of modern-day American roots music over the past decade. “Six nights a week, I’ll come out to the garage to write or paint, and it’s a time for me to escape into my little world for awhile. A chance to take a big breath, in and out.”

Hailed by everyone from NPR (who hosted Combs for an acclaimed Tiny Desk performance in 2023) to Rolling Stone (who deemed him “a pop perfectionist”), Combs has built his career with a chameleonic sound that explores subtlety, nuance, and the grey area between folk, country, and classic pop. The exploration continues with Dream Pictures, an album that finds its creator embracing atmospheric textures and heady, homegrown experimentation. The album opens with “Fly In My Wine” — an instrumental sound collage laced with upright piano, buzzing pedal steel, and field-recorded audio from a visit to Richard Serra’s installation at the Bilbao Guggenheim — and closes with the title track, where Combs’ voice leaps into a gorgeous falsetto during every chorus. Between those two bookends is a record that’s astral one moment and delicately earthbound the next, grounded in genuine song craft and a willingness to get weird.
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