Considering her Honest Life ended up being one of the most critically adored releases of 2016, it’s crazy that Courtney Marie Andrews spent a good year and a half wondering why no one seemed interested in what would become her breakthrough.

Reached by phone in Los Angeles, the Phoenix-raised singer says she approached a slew of labels about putting out the record. She got little response.

“I was really upset about it because, not to say the word too much, but I felt this record was the most honest thing I’d ever done,” Andrews admits. “I felt like every song held up to the standards that I hold songwriting up to, so I was really sad about it. I’d spent my whole life working towards making the kind of songs that I wrote.

“But at the end of the day, it was like, ‘What else am I going to do?’ As much as it’s fun to gather stories as a bartender, I felt like I really needed to persevere and stay strong.”

Honest Life eventually found a home on the Portland indie label Mama Bird Record Co., and was soon lovingly embraced by outlets ranging from the Guardian and Rolling Stone to Paste and No Depression. The across-the-board raves surprised both the singer and the label, as the album was released with little fanfare and then instantly hailed as a masterpiece of not only loneliness and heartbreak, but also hope and acceptance.

Nowhere is that duality better represented than on the album’s final track, “Only in My Mind”, where Andrews confesses to a list of failures and personal shortcomings over plaintive piano and wounded cello. The kicker to lines like “In my mind I got better/I was more thoughtful of others/Never judgmental or stubborn/Always gracious giving and kind” is a simple chorus: “But it was only in my mind.”

“In hindsight, while it’s sad, that song is to me an acceptance,” Andrews offers. “It’s kind of like when you get your first bill, or get into your first car accident, and your parents tell you, ‘Well, it’s life, and that’s just how it is.’ You’re like, ‘What the fuck?—this isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. I thought I’d be living this grandiose life once I hit 20.’ ”

Instead, the 26-year-old Andrews has learned that life is endlessly messy. The singer started making indie records in her teens, supplementing her art with side gigs from bartending to stints doing backup vocals and playing guitar with the likes of Damien Jurado and Jimmy Eat World.

Many of the songs on Honest Life can be traced to contract work in Belgium, where Andrews found herself with plenty of alone time after accepting a job as a backup singer for European pop star Milow. A painful breakup made that solitude doubly difficult.

“It was festival season, so they rented me an Airbnb in downtown Leuven, and there’d be times where I’d have five days free between shows,” she remembers. “That left me free to write, which was good, because I was going through a hard time. All I had was songs—there are only so many long-distance Skype calls that you can make. It ended up being a very self-reflective time, but also a very dark time.”

That darkness colours much of Honest Life, which straddles sun-faded ’70s-California folk and steel-guitar-dusted country, and centres on relationships that have gone totally south. Sometimes Andrews mines her observations behind the bar for inspiration; consider the devastating, soft-focus Americana of “How Quickly Your Heart Mends”, with lines like “Now I’m all dolled up for any drunken fool who thinks he can replace you.”

And sometimes she looks no further than herself, displaying a wisdom beyond her years on the drinking-doubles heartbreaker “Table for One”. (Sample lyric: “I’ve been driving till I get tired/Found peace in the redwoods/Lost it 20 miles later.”)

One of the wonderful payoffs of Honest Life is that many labels that were uninterested when Andrews first shopped the record are now reaching out. As for Andrews, she humbly but proudly suggests she never doubted herself or her songs, if only because of where they came from: a place of purity.

“Something very personal happened to me, so I was doing my best to cope,” Andrews says. “The first thing I started thinking about was ‘I’m going to write a great album.’ I was so in my head in a really bad way that the only thing that made me feel better was to sit down and write songs.”

Courtney Marie Andrews plays the Cobalt on Saturday (January 14).