James Blake busted out a lot of covers in 2020, and now he’s getting back into that mindset on his new Spotify Singles release. The two songs he performed are his own “Say What You Will” and a rendition of Bill Withers’ “Hope She’ll Be Happier.”
Blake says of his Withers cover:
“I chose to do the Bill Withers cover because his live version of that is one of my favorite recordings of all time and it just stayed with me for years and years until finally, I decided to try and take it on. Obviously, that is a bit daunting because it’s Bill Withers, but hopefully we did it justice. I like the change of timbre for me, I like singing over a guitar, and I like including some new chords and some elements of sampling to kind of give it a slightly different spin.”
He also noted of “Say What You Will, “With ‘Say What You Will,’ it was just a matter of trying to incorporate enough elements in the song, so it felt full even though there’s only three of us playing it and there’s like seven parts in the song. I don’t think we really have enough hands, but we gave it our best shot.”
Listen to Blake’s Spotify Singles recordings above.