Dylan calls Eric Andrsen a great ballad singer. The New York Times refers to him as “a singer and songwriter of the first rank.” For more than six decades he’s earned his place among the greats to emerge out of the Greenwich Village and Harvard Square coffeehouse scene. Friday night (5/8/26) he plays Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs. New York in what is being billed as the last stop on his last tour.
Andersen is often lumped together with artists of the mid-’60s folk scare. He was discovered by Tom Paxton and spent two winters in Boston taking night courses at Harvard on subjects like James Joyce, French symbolist poetry, and eastern religions. But he really found his home in Greenwich Village where he played his first gig at Gerde’s Folk City opening for Detroit blues boogie man John Lee Hooker in 1964.
“(Hooker) played music that scared those little girls,” Eric once told me. “They wanted to run and hide under their mom’s apron strings under their house dresses, hugging their knees. He was very nice, and we shared a dressing room. I was just nervous to be on stage. You got Bob Dylan in the audience. You got Dave Van Ronk and all these people looking at you. You know, it’s scary!”
Eric has toured the world and released more than 30 CDs of original music including a 2022 three-CD tribute album was released with contributions from Bob Dylan, Janis Ian, Richard Shindell, Linda Ronstadt, Happy Traum, Dom Flemons and others interpreting and covering his songs.
“I don’t think of myself as a creative person,” he says today. “It’s not what I do. It’s like a planter knows where to put the seeds and where to pick up the plants later. No preconceptions. I get a song. I write it down. I have tons of paper, just scribbles all over the place, ideas — ‘where did I put that paper?’ I try to keep them on the piano.”
Eric claims he hasn’t thought about Friday’s concert as being a climactic close to a long and storied career. “I don’t think about those things. I go up and do a show like I normally do. I don’t think first or last. I don’t think about it that way. I just do what I do when I do it. It may sound trite, but it’s tritely true.”
Looking back on his early career: “I was just writing, being able to get everybody to want free form. I think the lifestyle followed hand in hand. The lifestyle was free form, too. It wasn’t like sitting in a university office typing out poetry for a poetry book. It was like living a life. We were living our poems. That became true of the singer-songwriters, too.”
Six decades in, things have changed. “Your life might have become a little duller and boring because you don’t move around as much, but that doesn’t stop your mind because the mind has roots, and travels no matter where you are situated. It’s interesting.”
I asked him where he thought his mind would go at this, his last show. “I don’t think about those things. I go up and do a show like I normally do.”
He says the reaction to his latest album, Stand Up and Resist, has been incredible. The same with his live appearances. “The audience only had a couple of incidents where a few people walked out, you know? What are they doing at my show? They probably took a left turn by mistake. They should have taken a right. Ok, Ethel. We’re out of here.”
Eric doesn’t see himself in terms of a legacy. “If you think in that way then you think it’s over. I’m sure people do. I’m sure there’s some people who, because of circumstances, may think of that thing, but I never thought of it that way. Like I say, I leave it up to journalists to decipher that.”
Singer, songwriter, musician, producer, engineer, and studio ace Steve Addabbo plays guitar with Eric. Showtime is 8 p.m. Friday at Caffe Lena at 47 Phila St. in Saratoga Springs, NY. Steve has worked on many of Eric’s albums including Ghosts Upon the Road (1989), Stages: the Lost Album (1991), Memory Of the Future (1998), and You Can’t Relive the Past (2000) – the title track co-written and performed by Eric and Lou Reed. Eric on Fender Rhodes, appears on Steve’s first solo album Out of Nothing.
