Andrew Cushin has come of age

“At the time, I was probably a little bit like a deer in the headlights, not necessarily knowing what was going on,” he admits, thinking back to that initial interview half a decade ago. “I was a bairn. A lot of things that we're doing are still very eye-opening and amazing to be a part of, but everything that we did in those early few months — everything was new.”

Much of Cushin’s origin story has already been documented. Back then, he was a bit of a male ingénue — young, inexperienced, and green to the music industry (“I had no fucking idea what I was doing”). He was quickly championed by the likes of Noel Gallagher, Pete Doherty, Sam Fender and Louis Tomlinson and got a record deal when he was barely out of his teens. The release of debut record, Waiting For The Rain, in 2023 forced him to go through some growing pains. The first thing he wanted to tackle? His ego, which he admits skyrocketed after the hysteria.

“I had to look at myself in the mirror and really reevaluate what it was that I wanted to do,” he says. “Releasing the first few singles and going away and working with Noel [Gallagher] was a massive whirlwind. When I look back on it now, I think I handled it the best possible way I could. If I was to go and do those things again for the first time, obviously I'd be a bit more mature and all that, but I think we just handled it the best we could. You’ve got to remember — I was a 19, 20-year-old kid that was getting a record deal with Virgin/EMI through Noel Gallagher. That does not happen to people. That’s not real. It doesn’t really happen in this country, let alone on my street.”

The now-25-year-old singer/songwriter has been spending the time off the road making his second record, Love Is For Everyone, a record he started working on shortly after his last tour. “We did a final show in Cologne for Waiting For The Rain and we had a big celebration in the dressing room. That felt like that chapter was closing for me. From that day, we were working on the next chapter which would become Love Is For Everyone.”

When we speak, Cushin has been in the midst of rehearsals and production meetings ahead of a slew of release shows and a forthcoming tour. “We were working on pre-production over the weekend, getting everything ready,” Cushin says. “We’ve got a new guitarist — Johnny Bond, who used to be in Catfish and the Bottlemen, and my keyboard player, who’s been around the block for years, is also my musical director. He helps plan the set. And then we’ve got an amazing drummer and bass player — the band’s in great shape.” As the team built out the live set, they started to notice something shift. “We brought in a few tracks from the first record, but after the second day of rehearsals, me and the MD looked at each other and said, ‘This feels like a proper headline show now.’ That’s because the new songs — especially from the second album — are just so much bigger. They’re driven by electric guitars. They’ve got a larger-than-life feel.”

For an artist who pours so much of himself into every song, one would assume that having lyrics sung back at you would be affirming. For Cushin, though, it’s a double-edged sword and something he’s mindful of as he reckons with crafting the setlist. “It definitely changes,” he answers when asked about whether the relationships he has with his songs change once they are released. “There’s one called ‘Four and a Half Percent’, which is pretty self-explanatory. It’s about my dad and that whole part of my life. But the more I played it live, the more its meaning evolved. I’d have people come up after shows — maybe they were recovering alcoholics, or they’d lost their parents, or gone through their own trauma — and they’d tell me these really personal stories about how that song resonated with them. I’m still singing it from the perspective of that 18-year-old kid who had just lost his dad. At some point, with the more personal tracks, it feels like I’ve taken them as far as I can. They’ve helped me process what I needed them to. I’ve cut ‘Four and a Half Percent’ and ‘Even Where’s My Family Gone’, which also connects with people who’ve lost loved ones, because I’ve had to step back from playing that sometimes, too. It’s empowering to see people connect and sing along, but it’s also a bit conflicting. I sometimes wonder if I’ve opened up a kind of Pandora’s box — bringing up painful memories for people at a gig where they came to have a good time.”

The road from Waiting For The Rain to Love Is For Everyone wasn’t completely smooth. Neither Cushin nor his manager had much experience releasing a record (“I was his first ever artist, he was my first ever manager, so we both learned together”) and were somewhat applying the fake-it-till-you-make-it principle. Although Cushin admits they aren’t anywhere close to where he wants to be career-wise, having distance from his first body of work and the hysteria around his overall music project has helped. “At the time [of Waiting For The Rain] I assumed things happen naturally in music, but now I know what I need to do to get there.”

What has changed in the last five years, though, is just how much music has been warped by the rise of TikTok. Cushin had no interest in playing the algorithm game to get to where he wanted to in music, but coming up at a time when every music industry exec was pushing the app on every rising artist wasn’t entirely ideal. “I fucking hate it all,” he laughs at the idea of being a songwriter and a marketing machine. “I understand that that is what you've got to do. TikTok and Instagram reels—they're important tools to try and get your music to other people, but at the same time, I think people who find your music on there only ever have a 30-second attention span anyway before they scroll onto the next video. I've got to try and put the last five years of my work into a 30-second clip to try and get a hold of somebody's attention. It’s sad.”

To keep himself sane — and keep the essence of his music — he prioritises the songwriting and the live show as opposed to just being good on social media. For him, selling out a 5000-cap room means more than having five million followers on social media. He credits Louis Tomlinson for not only supporting his music but also giving him his first big break in America. “If he didn’t bring me over, I think it would’ve been really, really difficult to break into the American market,” he admits. “Honestly, we might’ve spent the next five or ten years just trying to get to a point where we could even start selling tickets. I’ll always be grateful to that guy. Louis was a huge supporter of up-and-coming music. He helped release my first record and he really pushed it on all his socials — just a genuinely lovely guy who helped me out in a big way.”

It was on that tour where Love Is For Everyone began taking shape. The first time he played what is now the album’s title track was at the iconic Hollywood Bowl (“That’s the most daunting thing to ever do as a singer-songwriter—go out and play a new song at Hollywood Bowl.”) He playfully scoffs when I ask if he requires a lot of prep — something typical artists now require to even think about stepping on stage. In a world where everything is nit-picked and fixated on, spontaneity in live music almost feels like a thing of the past. That mindset is something Cushin pushes against.

“The worst possible thing that can ever happen in anybody’s life is losing a parent or getting an illness or losing someone really close, and I kind of had to deal with a fair bit of that from a young age,” he states. “The way I see music now, it’s obviously an art form and a way to express yourself, but I speak to some people and they’ve got exactly the same mindset as you’ve just said. They're like, “I need to rehearse the song with the band, I need to get it set.” I’m very much like — just get on there and do it. I don’t like things that are too manufactured. I think things have got to be a little bit raw. I don’t get this whole pressure thing with music sometimes. We’ve got the best job in the world. It's stressful and hard, but it’s still the best job in the world. I get to go out on stage most nights and play songs that I’ve crafted in my bedroom and try to entertain people. It’s a dream. Just fucking enjoy it, man.”

It might be a bit of a trope — guy with a guitar singing about his feelings — but Cushin does genuinely believe that love is the thing that ties Love Is For Everyone together. “In 2025, it [love] is a really important thing,” he says. “Everybody has the right to love and to fall in love. It’s something we all experience—falling in and out of love. So naturally, it’s a subject that I think resonates with everyone. Whether or not someone likes the title track is another matter, but love is something we all understand on some level. Love is a central theme throughout the record. ‘Catch the Sun’ is obviously a love song, ‘Standing by My Side’ is another. Some of them aren’t the happiest love songs, but they’re all rooted in that theme. That made it easy to choose a self-titled track and build the album’s identity around it.”

Cushin worked with producer Gareth Nuttall, who mostly worked with indie bands and had worked with Gallagher in the past. “I’d never really heard of him before, and I think he’d only come across my name once or twice. What was great is that I went in there not having listened to much of his previous work, and he hadn’t heard any of the demos from the first album. So we just spent a few hours hanging out, as you do, chatting, plugging in guitars, bouncing ideas around. It was refreshing to work with someone where there were no expectations on either side.”

That blank slate for both Cushin and Nuttall meant that neither went into the studio with preconceived notions of what each song should sound like (“There were no big phone calls like, 'I want this track to sound like this”). The only thing that guided them both was Cushin’s desire to create more upbeat, electric tracks. “We pulled influences from everywhere. ‘Kiss The Sky’’ is probably the most Fontaines D.C.-sounding track I’ve ever done. Then ‘A Song for You’ feels more like Jake Bugg than anything else I’ve put out. Sonically, they all fit together, but no two songs are exactly the same. I think it’s my voice that ties it all together. We really just wanted to keep the energy up and show that, yeah, I like to think my songwriting’s improved, but also that I’m still a guy in his early twenties who loves playing electric guitar. That was important — to balance good songwriting with that raw, youthful energy. And credit to Gareth—he really helped make that happen.”

“I’m Coming Home,” the final track on Love Is for Everyone, brings Cushin’s emotional songwriting full circle, with sweeping strings and a story to match. “It’s funny, there’s a good story behind that one,” Cushin recalls. “We were in New York, doing the last show of the Louis Tomlinson tour at Forest Hills Stadium — where they do the US Open and all that. Unbelievable place. My keyboard player had come out with me, and his partner lives in New York, so we were staying in this apartment. One day, he walked into the living room, and I had just written I’m Coming Home. It took me about 10 minutes.”

Cushin was at the tail end of a six-and-a-half-week run in the States and heading home the next day. “I don’t know what it was — maybe I was just feeling emotional, thinking about my mum — but the song came out of nowhere. My keyboard player heard it and went, ‘You’re fucking prolific, aren’t you?’” The song made its live debut that very next night. “That day we played Forest Hills, and then I had my own headline show at the Mercury Lounge. It was packed — a brilliant night. I got up there and said, ‘I wrote this song last night,’ and played it. The crowd started singing it back to me. It had only existed for 24 hours.” He laughs, remembering another detail: “I’d fallen into a ditch about a week earlier, drunk, and got covered in poison ivy. It was all up my arms, my neck — absolutely agonising. I managed to hide it on the big outdoor stages. But the Mercury Lounge is tiny, and I thought, ‘Everyone’s going to see this.’ So I bought this massive, thick black hoodie to wear on stage. It was the most uncomfortable gig I’ve ever done.”

Despite the discomfort, the intimacy, the spontaneity, the emotion — it all fed into “I’m Coming Home”, which Cushin always envisioned as the album’s closer. “There’s nowhere else to go after that one. It had to be the last track. The strings are beautiful, and we’ve even added more for the live version — another arrangement at the end to really bring it home. It’s a big song.”

Cushin hopes that Love is For Everyone solidifies him further as an album artist rather than a one-hit wonder. “After the first record, I saw how many bands or artists release one record and then disappear,” he says. “I’ve realised this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I’m already halfway through writing the third album, and there’ll be a fourth after that. I’m going to keep making records for as long as I physically can. This is it for me. It’s set in stone. And if people are on board and enjoying it, then brilliant. The more the merrier.”