Florida-born, NYC-based singer-songwriter Amy Jay has released her debut album, Awake Sleeper. Recorded at Brooklyn's Mason Jar Music with producer Jonathan Seale (Feist, Fleet Foxes, Aoife O'Donovan), Awake Sleeper marks Jay's third official project and first full-length release.
Awake Sleeper was profoundly inspired by Jay's day-to-day life in New York City, conjuring its incessant energy, its ambient noise and constant motion, occasionally quiet but ceaseless in its flow. Jay gave life to her songs with an idiosyncratic sound equally informed by experimental electronica, classical music, and post-rock as it is by traditional acoustic folk songcraft.
"It was a conscious choice that the recording elements reflect the lyrical themes, like for example, when we doubled the vocals to mimic emotional duality, or repetitive instrumentation to evoke anxiety or stuckness," Jay says. "The direction of the music was very much decided by how best to portray these themes sonically."
Having made Awake Sleeper in what now feels like a distant past, Amy Jay is looking firmly towards the future, driven to continually push her songcraft towards new terrain while still honoring her remarkable debut album with the attention and self-love it so rightly deserves.
"It's complicated," Jay says, "because obviously I'm proud of this huge, monumental thing that I'm doing. I have to just remember it's a time capsule, a glimpse into a life before the world crashed, snapshots of memories. We captured what was happening at the time, written in the past, relevant for today."
Tracklist:
1. Lucid Dreaming
2. Reliance
3. Commute
4. All My Name
5. Inner Critic6. Monster
7. Bide My Time
8. Sorrow
9. Remember
10. Self-Deprecation
