Andrew McKnight

Since they first joined forces back in 2008, Andrew and his Beyond Borders bandmates have served as the “host band” for the Mountville Folk Festival in nearby Aldie, Virginia. Now in its 32nd year, Mountville has grown from a backyard singer/songwriter gathering into an intimate community experience on a beautiful setting. The production team now includes a dedicated livestream team handling the broadcast each year, so you can enjoy the band's set from this year's festival right here (or click to Watch on…

Andrew is now in his seventh year working with Mack Bailey's amazing “healing trauma through songwriting” program, Music Therapy Retreats. This past weekend back in Holly Springs NC, Andrew teamed up with Jacob, a vet from Durham, to tell his story in “I Believe”. It was another powerful retreat experience, with the participating  vets receiving an Epiphone Hummingbird acoustic guitar as well as their own brand-new song.

Andrew also continues his work building a video guitar lesson library as part of the…

This summer Andrew resumes his work with the wonderful youth songwriting program Chords of Courage in Frederick County, Maryland. For several years, Andrew taught weekly songwriting workshops as part of their annual Step Up! songwriting contest for middle and high school students, making history and current events come to life while inspiring us to STEP UP! and make a difference through service projects.

This summer Chords of Courage is bringing songwriting into Frederick County summer camps, in keeping with…

It has been a pleasant surprise that the booking office has been fielding calls and emails from farther afield this spring! While the annual autumn trip to New England has continued during the slow recovery from the pandemic, the closure of many venues nationwide during and since has generally kept touring closer to home in northern Virginia. The economics of being on the road are sharply more challenging as well, which forces us to be cautious in the planning department as well. Some of the wonderful…

April 1, 2026

Andrew and his Beyond Borders bandmates are in the midst of another big project along with recording their batch of collaborative songs in the studio. On March 28th they filmed two shows in front of a rapt audience at their Cabin Studios near Leesburg, VA. With Les's platinum and gold records for the Will the Circle Be Unbroken album serving as shiny inspirational backdrop, the band rolled through a 16-song set of mostly that same collaborative material for a 6-camera shoot with multitrack…

Next up: a rare band livestream concert, Andrew McKnight & Beyond Borders Sat. Feb. 21st, 7pm EST presented by Focus Music. Tickets are $15 to watch the livestream in realtime - get yours now for a very fun evening!

The final show for the season happens Thursday March 26th at 8pm EDT, per usual for free on our YouTube channel.

More About the Series

As the Northern Hemisphere turns towards cold weather and long nights, we're into the fourth season of "Long Nights Livestream Series," a somewhat regular schedule…

We're starting early this year because we always seem to start late every year! No need to wait til “Small Business Tuesday” or whatever other moniker the capitalist infrastructure invents to dress up their hunger for seasonal profits. This small business of making art greatly appreciates you every Tuesday and every other day too.

So beginning Tuesday November 18th and running until midnight on New Year's Eve, save 20% on anything at our Bandcamp store using code save20 at checkout. That means all album…

November 10, 2025

This Veterans Day 2025 will be special for ten veterans who participated in Music Therapy Retreats (MTR) this year. 

MTR helps veterans and trauma survivors find healing through the power of music therapy at retreats across the country, where participants learn, write, and record their own songs as part of their healing journey. A partnership with Breedlove gets each participant a guitar of their own, as part of the therapeutic after care as well as mindfulness exercises and other healing…

November 3, 2025

To my followers who are also Spotify users, I'm pulling all of my music from that particular platform by the end of November, and I thought you might want to know why my music disappeared.

It's no secret that streaming platforms have hurt most indie artists and the music industry in general, turning record sales revenue into tiny royalty streams. Most of us continue to host our music on the big platforms with the hope that more people will discover our music and become followers, and perhaps…

October 25, 2025

Long ago Andrew was a young environmental engineer working at an employee-owned global consulting firm CH2M HILL. By the end of 1996 Andrew found himself pulled in two directions, as an emerging artist and an engineer, and made the difficult choice to turn away from a stable career into these past three-decades as a self managed independent artist. He's kept lots of ties with friends across the country from those days of course, and kept tabs on his old firm whose motto was “do good work…

Thanks to the Media Department at the Handley Regional Library in the historic downtown of Winchester VA, we were able to livestream Andrew's hourlong A Little Noon Music performance on October 10, 2025 to their Facebook account. We invite you to watch it right here, and have your lunch with Andrew!

The setlist:

Native American flute improvisation -> Embarking -> Left Behind
Web of Mystery
My Little Town
Ansel Adams
Good Enough [co-write with Brandon E.]
Anniversary (2,000 Years Ago)
Good Things Matter
Count Your…

We are thrilled to receive notice that for the 17th consecutive year, the Virginia Commission for the Arts has awarded Andrew a Touring Assistance Grant and a place in their prestigious touring artist directory. The VCA's mission is to help bring art to every corner of Virginia. Eligible presenters (municipalities, schools, churches, non-profit organizations, etc) in the Commonwealth can get reimbursed for up to 50% of Andrew's fees for concerts, workshops and other programs. In just these past few years…

My veteran co-writer from this past weekend's Music Therapy Retreats in North Carolina has kindly allowed me to share his song, so his far-flung family can hear it too. And as leaders do, he stepped forward for his fellow wounded warriors to say, let's invite the world to hear one of our stories.

 So I'm going to share that and a couple of my other songs co-written with vets too this Thursday night June 5th on my YouTube channel. It'll be fairly short, like 15-20 minutes, but it's a great way to share a new…

March 17, 2025

As he has for the past several Januaries, Andrew led a series of free songwriting workshops for any interested middle and high school students in Frederick County, Maryland as part of the Chords of Courage Step Up Frederick! songwriting contest. The contest seeks to honor and elevate heroes both famous and ordinary who through great personal struggle and sacrifice made a difference in the lives of others. While workshop attendance is not required to enter the contest, Andrew helps interested…

Veteran's Day 2024

As we honor and celebrate those who've stood in harm's way on our behalf today, I'd love to highlight a great program that uses songwriting as a tool to help our vets healing the less-visible wounds and scars of service and sacrifice. My friend Mack Bailey has devoted his life and musical career to Music Therapy Retreats (formerly Music Therapy of the Rockies), holding retreats all over the country to bring vets and songwriter partners together in comfortable settings. 

MTR is saving lives…

Over the years since their 2008 debut at the prestigious John F. Kennedy Center in Washington DC, Andrew and Beyond Borders bandmates Lisa Taylor, Stephanie Thompson and founding Nitty Gritty Dirt Band member Les Thompson have co-written and performed several songs together that are staples of their shows. For the past several years, they've performed only a handful of shows each year, in large part due to Les's busy schedule touring with fellow NGDB alumnus John McEuen doing their Will the Circle Be…

Despite the near 100° temperatures, this year's Mountville Folk Festival in Aldie VA was off the charts for great music and a fabulous audience. And in spite of bandmate Les Thompson's instruments being sidelined while recovering from shoulder surgery, he still joined in and sang a bunch while Stephanie and Lisa held down the rhythm section. Andrew's daughter Madi opened the festival the previous evening with a set of Celtic and Appalachian fiddle tunes with her group The Porch Wrens, and she kept the…

New from the Media Room - an hour plus long career retrospective and conversation about upcoming projects, as well as plenty of music, in the March 28th episode of "Living on Music with Steve Houk" podcast. Andrew says of his appearance;

"I've rarely sat for a long form interview, and never with anyone who did so much homework on my life and career. Steve is top shelf on seeking out interesting content, and has a great curiosity about lots of things that he uses to steer the conversation. It was a lovely…

These are definitely some of the most challenging times many of us artists have faced. I have always been able to “read the tea leaves” sufficiently to plan my own individual course over the coming 1 to 3 years. Along that journey I've been fortunate to have attracted a small but enthusiastic cadre of supporters who've made my life in music be my livelihood for nearly 30 years. 

A sober assessment of the current climate for independent music must consider the impacts of the pandemic on smaller sized…

 It's been nine years since we finished the filming and had the premiere event for our mini-documentary “Sound of Home”. The film follows luthier Martin Fair at Fairbuilt Guitar Company through designing and building a custom guitar for Andrew from local native wood. The production team was in the process of making final edits a few weeks later when an inadvertant software update disassembled the film timeline, and the work was shelved. The members of the team got involved in other projects, and so it sat…