"Andy Friedman is not exactly one of those musicians you play while you're paying your bills or cleaning the house," says NPR, "his songs demand that you sit down and listen to them, which is why he is such a hot live act." While his songs are anything but funny, Friedman has published over a dozen gag cartoons in The New Yorker under the pseudonym Larry Hat. As an award-winning illustrator published under his own name, Friedman’s portraits of cultural figures appear regularly in literally hundreds of magazines and newspapers worldwide, including recent covers for the New York Times Magazine and The New Republic.

   ASSOCIATED PRESS: "Friedman can write a lyric, and deliver it… He is not to be overlooked, that's for sure.”
   LA WEEKLY: “Andy Friedman works a weird, potent strain of art-damaged, ragged-but-right country pathology.”
   VILLAGE VOICE: "[Friedman] nails the ambivalent impulses confounding the hearts of hard-drinking, Haggard-spinning, middle-aged urban family men everywhere."
   PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: "A songwriter with an engagingly singular voice."
   HARTFORD ADVOCATE: “Friedman's music is slow, lugubrious, smart, dipped in country heartache… [and has much] in common with Kris Kristofferson, Tom Waits and even Shane MacGowan of the Pogues in terms of a shale-voiced and poetic take of spiritual decrepitude.”
   BURLINGTON FREE PRESS: “Woody, Hank, Dylan, and Waits… [Friedman's] lyrics are sharp enough to hold up favorably with that lofty foursome."
   UTNE READER: “Friedman’s serendipitous stories offer an almost clinical examination of the insides of an artist’s skull.”
   SLANT MAGAZINE: " Friedman co-opts that tradition for a contemporary, urban perspective, and he does so in a way that shows a deep appreciation for the genre's forms and functions… ["Weary Things"] announces Friedman's arrival as one of the genre's smartest and deepest talents."
   SONIC BOOMERS: “With a voice that sounds like sleep is the enemy and experience is king, Friedman reaches down to drag up big and small truths, drops them inside the deep fryer and out pop real songs, the kind that move you because reality lives within them.
   ROCHESTER DEMOCRAT & CHRONICLE: "A dusty, paint-splattered Americana sage."
   PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER: “A cranky social scientist… Friedman goes about the hazy lazy business of making music that would've fit perfectly into Manhattan's Lone Star circa 1973… tear-in-your-Scotch dusty country-politan by an urban cowboy.”
   CHARLESTON GAZETTE: “An earthy, old-fashioned tour through a new America.”
   COLUMBIA FREE TIMES: "Equal parts hillbilly country stomp and Leonard Cohen poetry… [exploring] the terrifying highs and the exquisite lows of the common man like few songwriters can."
   FORT WORTH WEEKLY: "Intelligent, original country, folk, and blues… [Friedman is] a keen observer of himself and what's around him."
   FAR WEST ALMANAC: “These talkin’ blues and and self-analytical brain trails [are written by] a man with something to say. That’s what was important back when Greenwich was green, right?”
   PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS: “Devotees of Tom Waits, John Prine and early electric Bob Dylan should get a charge out of the wild wordplay and aggressively twangy tones of ‘Weary Things’ by Andy Friedman & The Other Failures.”