With a gently plucked guitar and a shimmering vocal, Amy Stroup’s cover of Jim James’ A New Life glitters with the kind of pearlescent beauty that evokes thoughts of the Double R in my mind… Sweeping romance, an earnest sense of desire, and just a dash of magic and, dare I say it, doom.
For the unfamiliar, Jim James leads country-psyche outfit My Morning Jacket, a band whose music I have always admired from afar, despite never reaching a personal heavy-rotation status. His original of A New Life is a bluesy-country piece that gradually builds, a dash of rockabilly giving it a sense of movement. Stroup’s take is itself more aligned with James’ own Alt Version — stripped back, his vocal bruised, yearning and just a bit desperate.
Both James and Stroup just about bleed out the line, “Hey, let’s get one thing clear… There’s a bit more stardust when you’re near”. But it is Stroup’s version that feels like it floats amongst the stars. Her spectral vocal and the surrounding instrumentation seems to float in the air, unmoored from gravity, as she lays out her unvarnished desires for her audience. Her stomach is in her throat and heart in her hands, just waiting for some sort of response from the one she loves so completely.
The experience of giving oneself up to love is both terrifying, and yet completely fulfilling… The need to hide who you are or what you feel can vanish in an instant, and suddenly, it doesn’t seem like anything else matters. Of his song, Jim James told Rolling Stone,
“It’s about making a conscious choice to open a new door for oneself. To step forward out of safe stagnation or fear and into beauty or peace or whatever you would like to call truth in your heart in order to begin a new life in and of love.”
Based in Nashville, A New Life is Amy Stroup’s first song since her 2018 solo release, Helen of Memphis, and the first from her new album Since Frank. Following encouragement from friends, Stroup engaged with producer Chad Copelin (LANY, Broncho, Ben Rector). “You have to work with him, you guys would love each other,” said her friends, and yes, she did – she loved working with him. Amy claims A New Life as one of her all-time favourite songs, and it shows. This is a performance that hits me right in the gut – honest, raw and beautiful.