Apple Music Home Session: James Bay

James Bay has been asked to cover songs before. In fact, he’s previously done it for Apple Music, delivering his takes on Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and Coldplay’s “Trouble” as part of his first Home Session in 2020. But in all his years as a singer-songwriter, he’d avoided taking on a Rolling Stones song—until the chance to record a second volume of his Home Session prompted a rethink. “I suppose I’d never picked a Stones cover before because I hold them so high and they’re such a legendary and iconic band,” he tells Apple Music. “But on this occasion, I thought it would be great fun to try to incorporate a Stones song into my solo, intimate singer-songwriter sound.”

The track he chose is “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” with Bay looking to two American guitarists and one Canadian alt-folk star for inspiration. “The guitars are acoustic guitars and there’s some single-coil pickups but the sounds are quite fuzzy and electric at the same time,” he says. “I mashed acoustic and electric together in a way which I’ve heard Ry Cooder and Blake Mills do a lot. Leif Vollebekk’s sound is also something that inspired the way I approached this. I played a little bit of percussion and bass on this track as well, and I wanted it to chug along in that locomotive-train way that some country music and Americana does, so I gave it a kind of double-time rhythm compared to the original version.”

Alongside that track and the 2020 covers of “Trouble” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” you can also hear a new version of “One Life,” taken from Bay’s third album, Leap. “It’s a song that means so much to this chapter of my life as an artist,” he says. “It really reflects where I was: I was writing these songs to help me lift myself out of a darker time in my life, a more difficult time dealing with a bunch of anxiety that was dragging me down. To write songs is its own therapy, but also I looked to the really special people in my life, who are so close to me and so important to me, and I wanted to emphasize in my writing just how they keep my chin above water when I need it the most. This one really focuses on my relationship with [Bay’s partner] Lucy and it’s a celebration of that.”