Artist Biography

Andrew Thoreen is a singer-songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist based in Saint Paul Minnesota. An avant-garde pop traditionalist with outsider art sensibilities, Andrew is a producer, arranger, session musician, improvisor, and sideman.

     There’s a beautiful duality to Andrew Thoreen’s music. It makes his music hard to describe as it informs every collaboration, production, and arrangement with which he involves himself. This is the nature of pushing against the status quo, it might get a little strange, but for Thoreen there is truth and logic within that chaos. It’s why his writing, session work, and arrangements have become sought after commodities by other artists.

Thoreen walks the line between being songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, between experimental and pop, between jazz and classical, between composed and improvised. This balance of influences is a present through-line in his songwriting and production as Andrew Thoreen, his co-writing in art-pop project, Har-di-Har, his chamber-pop recording project, andandending, his work as a sideman and collaborator with J.E. Sunde, and his trombone playing in free-jazz ensemble, TROMBONE BAND.

In 2018 Thoreen was a recipient of a Metropolitan Region Arts Council Next Step Grant.  With this grant Thoreen was able to build out a modest home recording studio and produced and released two EPs in 2019: Songs of Isolation for Rock Quartet as Andrew Thoreen and Lots in Thought as Andandending.

Thoreen’s career began as a jazz musician. He attended the University of Northern Iowa on a jazz trombone scholarship. While there, he fell in love with composition, jazz, psych-rock, and improvised music. In 2008 he began experimenting with ways to connect these genres with more traditional pop elements, founding the psychedelic neo-soul band, Lick it Ticket.

In 2012 he co-founded Har-di-Har with his wife Julie Thoreen, a logical extension of his jazz, chamber, and pop aesthetics. They’ve released four EPs and one LP, completed numerous national tours, and received accolades from sites such as Bandcamp, THRDCOAST, 89.3 The Current, Indie Shuffle, Ear Buddy, Yvynyl, Impose Magazine, BIRP! Indie Playlist, Le Choix and Daytrotter.

Recently he has done session work as a trombonist and bassist for artists such as Eric Mayson, John Mark Nelson, J.E. Sunde, White Dune, Kristin Andreassen, Drone Band, Sister Species, Adam Zahller, Waldemar, YYY, Caley Conway, Batteryboy, Eustace the Dragon, This is Daybreak, Dana T, and Brian Just.

This mix of avant-garde, pop, traditionalist, and outsider art sensibilities is what makes Thoreen's work so distinctive. This beguiling aesthetic continues to manifest in his creativity, in his young career, and in a mind that finds beauty in contradiction.