Editor’s note: For Andrea Whitt, the hunger to express her creativity seeks many outlets, from the stage to the sketchbook. In a talk with Playboy, Whitt elaborates on the vivid life she’s lived on the stage playing with premier musicians such as Shania Twain, Jelly Roll, Stevie Wonder, and more.
Playboy: Your life is a celebration of creativity, from watercolor visions to your ability to tell musical stories via so many different instruments. Tell us about your relationship with your creativity.
Andrea Whitt: I started as a visual artist, drawing and painting when I was about 18 months old. My parents would just give me a pen and paper, and I would do that instead of playing with toys. So I always thought I was going to be a painter before I even started playing music.
A lot of times when I tour, I have a travel sketchbook that I bring with me. I paint on location. I did a three-year world tour with the Italian artist Zucchero. So we’d stop in cities like Rio, where I sat underneath Christ the Redeemer and painted that. I went on the Rialto Bridge at 5 a.m. before the tourists got there and did a three-hour painting of Venice. The Roman Colosseum, places in Greece, Buenos Aires and the Tango District. So that’s been like a really special project of mine. I remember those three to four hours that I sat there painting more than even just like snapping a photo here or there while I’m on tour. So that’s been a really special part of traveling for me, bringing my artwork everywhere.
I started music when I was like eight or nine. I actually started on guitar. I taught myself with like a little cassette tape of blues and country guitar that my parents got me. I was classically trained on viola when I was nine, and then went full force studying classical viola through college. Then I got into playing jazz and improvising and then that morphed into my career in Los Angeles where I picked up fiddle and rock and blues and pedal steel.
I’m always looking for ways to expand my art, whether it’s bringing in new supplies into a drawing class or experimenting with oil painting, which I’ve done recently, or picking up new instruments.
Playboy: What was the first time in your life you heard a piece of music that made you think, “Oh, I want to create music too”? What was that music, if you remember?
Andrea: What first drew me to music were instruments themselves, whether it was guitar or viola. I picked viola because I was in elementary school in our general music class and we had the orchestra director come in and demonstrate all the bowed string instruments. And he played the viola and I was like, I need to play that instrument. It just spoke to me. It was a deeper tone than a violin. So I chose viola because of that.
And then it wasn’t until I was like 12 or 13 when I started getting into like rock, when the grunge era came out. I heard the song “Today” by Smashing Pumpkins, and that band is like my original favorite band. I still studied classical music, but when I heard that band in particular, I was like, I want to play rock and roll in some sense. I didn’t like put down viola and say I’m going to play guitar. I just kept doing what I was doing, but I would just choose to listen to stuff outside of classical music.
Playboy: You play viola, fiddle, and pedal steel guitar. How do the stories you tell through music differ between the three instruments?
Andrea: Viola, because it’s like this deeper register—that’s what I was initially attracted to—I picked that instrument when I was nine. I play mostly classical music on viola, [since] the viola’s role is mostly lush harmonies and stuff that’s in the lower register. It’s a beautiful melody that just hits you in a certain way. And, I love harmonies. So that’s kind of the role that viola plays in my life.
Fiddle is a smaller instrument than viola. So you can play faster, more easily on that instrument, and it cuts more when you’re playing in a band. So 99 percent of the time, if I’m playing in a band, it’s on violin or fiddle. They’re the same thing. Basically, whenever anyone asks me what’s the difference between a violin and a fiddle, I say a violin has strings and a fiddle has “strangs.”
I feel like the pedal steel emulates the human voice so well. And so it really, really touches people when they hear that instrument, I think more so than any other instrument. If I’m playing melodies on steel, I’m extracting the melodies more from the chords. Rather like with violin or viola, if I’m playing melodies that outline the chords, since it’s a linear instrument.
Playboy: You have a long history of working with Shania Twain. Tell us about some of your moments touring that have brought you the most joy.
Andrea: So I did her first Vegas residency after she had taken a 10-year hiatus. It was really cool, that energy of being back, and she was just getting her feet wet back on stage. We had a pretty large ensemble, with dancers. It was just such a fun family that we had together. We had lots of dinners. We had karaoke nights with Shania. I played tennis with her a couple of times, her and her husband. They’re both so welcoming. We all lived in Vegas for two to three months at a time playing these shows. So yeah, it became like a nice tight knit family.
When I was in Shania’s band, I was hired on viola. The musical director called me as soon as I got hired and said, “You play fiddle too, right?” And I was like, “Yeah, duh.” And I didn’t even own a violin. And so I literally went out the next day. I bought a violin. And I was like, let’s go.
I just like dove in the deep end. I started taking fiddle lessons. I went to some bluegrass jams. I fell completely on my face. I was just trying to learn like all the vocabulary. And since I’m classically trained, there’s a lot of technique that comes with that. So I can, if I’m given something to copy, I can easily do that. But like your fiddle style playing wasn’t in my blood. So I was just like, we’re going to make this happen.
And then that’s when I started playing pedal steel as well. So we’re in rehearsal—one of the coolest memories about being in Shania Twain’s band is me being in rehearsals. I’m playing my new violin that I literally just started playing like a couple months prior. And I’m watching the pedal steel player. I’d never seen a pedal steel in person. It just blew me away and I became obsessed. I ordered a pedal steel off of eBay and I had it sent to my hotel room in Vegas. I just went for it. I was like, I need to create those sounds. It was kind of like when I first heard the viola when I was little, and that’s what really drew me into music.
Playboy: You recently started performing solo shows. How does the energy of these performances feel in contrast with performing with others?
Andrea: It was super nerve wracking planning a whole solo show, because I just wanted everyone to have a good time and I think I just didn’t want to disappoint everyone. I just felt like there was a lot of pressure. Normally when I’m hired for someone else’s project, I enjoy like learning the music and just getting up on stage and doing my thing. But this was an insane amount of organization and learning how to corral a band together. It was the first solo show that I did, and I’m hoping to do one maybe later this year, early next year.
So [we had] an exclusive viewing party for my music video, Sleepwalk, where we played it on the big screen. And Robby Krieger (The Doors guitarist) was a guest artist, which was insane. Robby called me and said, “I’d love to be a guest on your show. But can we add like two more Doors songs? And I was like, “Yes, whatever you want.”
It was a blast and I definitely want to do it again. Next time I do it. I’m going to involve charities and like, you know, now I know how to plan a solo show. So it was an amazing experience and I couldn’t have asked for a better first one.
Playboy: Your upcoming tour with Moby is to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Play, which was the soundtrack to many people’s high school years. You must be excited.
Andrea: So exciting. Yeah, the first time I heard Play, someone was playing it at the very first party I went to in college. I was so intrigued. I had never heard anything like it. It was just so different and so, so fascinating, that music. So I was hooked. And then he asked me to play all those songs on stage in Europe in these big arenas every night. I’m so honored to do that.
Moby is an artist that approached me and I was like, “Wow, okay.” I never even thought about doing a tour with Moby. This is rad. It’s so different from what I do, because I mostly country and rock now, that’s a lot of the artists I tour with. So, it’s cool to do the Moby tour and then jump on tour with Struggle Jennings, who’s an outlaw country artist. Having those two back to back is going to be fun because they couldn’t be more opposite sides of the spectrum.
Playboy: As a musician, what are some of the bands you’re listening to today that electrify and inspire you the most?
Andrea: Last summer, I was introduced to Ashley McBride. She’s a country artist. When I was on the Jelly Roll last summer with Struggle, we were one of a handful of bands who were opening for Jelly Roll and Ashley was one of them [too]. I watched her set every night side stage. She’s just so captivating on stage and just like, badass like female empowerment. I didn’t miss her set, like, any night. Her songs are great. Her band is so tight.
Let’s see, I’ve recently gotten into Mitski. Some of it’s like a little throwback ’90s, which is very cool, music that I grew up listening to. Larkin Poe is rad. Lainey Wilson. My friend Katie Gavin, she’s the lead singer of this band, Muna, and I’ve been teaching her fiddle lessons. She’s trying something completely different and out of her wheelhouse. So, you know, it’s fun to have these empowering women that you’re communicating with, and my students inspire me back.
And then, you know, standards, like, I listen to a lot of Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, you know, Grateful Dead, obviously. I like a lot of jazz. Sonny Rollins, Ella Fitzgerald. So, it’s all over the place.
Playboy: You’ve already had many dream collaborations with historic musicians in your career, but if you can have a few more, who are they?
Andrea: Well, obviously Billy Corgan. We got to hit that, yeah. I’d love to collaborate with Slash. I’ve given Slash a couple of pedal steel lessons. He just started playing a couple years ago, and it’s so fun to connect with other people who are just as obsessed with pedal steel as I am. So I think it might be something really epic if like we did a collaboration where we’re both playing steel on something.
Obviously like Dead & Company, Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan, Robert Plant, Lana Del Rey. I mean, I have a laundry list of people that I want to collaborate with. Yeah. Kamasi Washington. I play with him on viola for recordings, but I’d love to do like a tenor sax pedal steel song with him too. So my vision board is literally filled up with all the artists that I want to play with. That’s my vision. And a house in the South of France.
Playboy: There are very few female pedal steel guitarists in the world today. Why do you think that is? Do you hope to influence other women to discover the instrument?
Andrea: I think there are such few female pedal steel players because pedal steel is actually one of the newest instruments invented. It came about in the ’50s. There was Hawaiian lap steel before that, like the ’30s and the ’40s, but pedals weren’t added to the instrument until the ’50s. And so when pedals started to become a staple of the instrument, it was in country music.
And, you know, being an instrumentalist in country music in the ’50s, it [was] a very male dominated career. There’s a lot of female singers, but there’s very few female instrumentalists. And that still is the case. I think because of our roles in society, it’s harder for females to go on tour. You know, someone staying home and taking care of the family.
I think pedal steel is crossing over more genres, so more and more people are becoming aware of that instrument. I would love to be an inspiration to other women, to attract them to the instrument. And I hope with my music video release and everything that I’m doing, that it does inspire more women to play. It’s such a satisfying instrument to play for the player and for the listener.