As a session player, he’s been highly featured on CDs by drumming legend Simon Phillips, a live CD with Olivia Newton-John (Andy has been her music director/guitarist for several U.S. tours), two internationally acclaimed CDs by Kip Winger, recording sessions for Paula Abdul, Paul Stanley, and countless radio and television jingles. He has also played alongside many of his heroes such as Steve Vai and Joe Satriani (as a regular guest on their G3 tours in Dallas), Eric Johnson, Steve Morse, Mike Stern, Ace Frehley, Ted Nugent, and Pierre Bensusan, as well as some of his fave ’60’s singing stars such as the Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, Gordon Waller, and Kip Winger.
Andy’s musical career began in his hometown of Evansville, Indiana at the age of 13 with his first band, Taylor Bay. “Early on, I realized that making it in a rock band was such a long-shot, that I better figure out other ways of making a living playing guitar. I began reading about players like Steve Lukather and Larry Carlton who made their living as session musicians. This really appealed to me, since I really loved a wide variety of musical styles.”
The decision to pursue the studio scene led him to more serious music studies. He studied classical guitar for two years before moving to Miami to study jazz guitar at the University of Miami (largely because the Dixie Dregs, Pat Metheny, and Jaco Pastorius had all gone there). He eventually ended up in Dallas where he was very fortunate to get a foot in the door of a very good studio scene. In 1988, the Andy Timmons band was formed and he quickly gained a following in Texas. Around that time, Epic recording artists Danger Danger recruited him to finish their debut record, film several videos, and begin touring.
After 4 years in New York with Danger Danger, Andy returns to Dallas in 1993 to restart with the sessions and with the Andy Timmons Band. His first solo album, “Ear X-tacy”, was released in 1994 to the enthusiasm of critics and in 1997 “Ear X-tacy 2” was released. He later publishes “Pawn Kings” (1997), “Orange Swirl” (1998), “The Spoken and the Unspoken” (1999), and “And-thology 1 & 2” (2000). In 2001 Andy signed with Favored Nations and released his first international album, “That Was Then, This is Now”, a compliation of the first two “Ear X-tacy” and five new songs. “Resolution” (2006) is the first album entirely of unreleased songs released for Favored Nations.
The same year he also publishes “Here Comes the Son – An Acoustic Christmas”. In 2011 he released “Andy Timmons Band Plays Sgt. Peppers”, an album in which Timmons revisits some of the songs from the famous Beatles album with only the help of guitar, bass and drums. The same year he contributed to the soundtrack of the video game Duke Nukem Forever with the reinterpretation of “Grabbag”, the iconic song from the 1996 videogame.
In 2016 “Theme from a Perfect World” sees the light.
In 2013 he joined together with keyboardist Steve Weingart and bassist Ernest Tibbs in the band of Simon Phillips Protocol, with whom he released two albums of progressive rock and fusion genre.
Andy has been consistently voted a “Top 20 Favorite Guitarist” in most of Japan’s rock music magazine’s reader polls, as well as being voted “Musician of the Year” four years in a row in the acclaimed Dallas Observer Music Awards. He also has become one of the most respected and sought after clinicians representing Ibanez Guitars, touring the world on their behalf.
He is a very technical guitarist, with a control of dynamics and expressive techniques such as bending and vibrato common to a few other virtuosos and able to range from jazz to bossa nova, from country to metal, from blues to pop rock without neglecting instrumental rock and prog rock, which remain the most frequent genres of his albums. For this reason he has been repeatedly called to collaborate with artists such as Mike Stern, Sidney Carvalho, Martin Miller, Steve Weingart and many others.
