(New York, NY) Awake Sleeper, the first full-length album by indie-folk artist Amy Jay was profoundly influenced by life in New York City. The new single, “Lucid Dreaming,” released today, was inspired by Jay’s time on the subway, observing those around her. LISTEN HERE.

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“I somehow ended up in the front subway car on the A express train zooming down Manhattan on my way to work, and was mesmerized by the prisms that were forming out of the double-paned window of the train door,” she says. “As I was in some sort of hypnotic, half asleep, morning commute state, I also picked up the smells of sunscreen and cigarettes, which was probably someone on their way to the beach. But it brought me straight back to a specific, vivid just-like-yesterday memory of a childhood pool party in Miami Lakes where I grew up. Contrasting that past memory with the current state of my mind asking, ‘Am I really an adult?’ and, ‘What is truth, does it even exist?’ is what brought me to write this song. It was a strange train ride.”

Exploring the boundaries between acoustic and synthetic, minimalist and ornate, Jay’s music echoes a breathtaking cross-pollination of introspective songcraft, surprising textures, and hypnotic soundscapes. Working with longtime friend and producer Jonathan Seale of Mason Jar Music, known for his work with Feist, Fleet Foxes, Aoife O’Donovan, and more, as well as his own solo efforts released under the moniker Son of Cloud, 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.

Awake Sleeper is Jay’s first full-length release and follows two successful EPs, 2016’s Supposed to Be and 2018’s So It Is. Recorded in the fall and winter of 2019, in its own way, the album pre-imagines the city’s strange magic during the pandemic, its perpetual buzz lurking just below a sense of haunting solitude.

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.”

Awake Sleeper will be released on February 11, 2022, and a video for “Lucid Dreaming,” is coming soon.

AMY JAY ONLINE

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