The Lioness Roars So Sweetly On This Romantic Cover Version
“Amy always said, ‘Hey we need a reggae song for this album,’” the singer’s longtime friend and producer Salaam Remi said earlier this week at a listening session for the forthcoming album, Lioness: Hidden Treasures, which kicks off with a bright & bouncy reggae version of the dreamy Ruby & The Romantics chart-topper from 1962. “This is a vocal that she did early in her career, but in true Amy form. And when I was playing different songs for her family, everybody was like ‘That’s it, the reggae one.'” The same song was covered in 1971 by The Heptones in a dreamy Rock Steady stylee, but Remi’s 2011 remix is steppin’ it hotter this year.
“When we first started working together,” Remi reveals in a recent Complex interview. “I was introducing her to loads of music, cause Amy was still just 18 and she hadn’t heard this stuff. So we were vibing on different things. She actually learned this song overnight and spit it back out the next day like she’d known it all her life. And I had forgotten she recorded it. Then later we flipped it as a reggae version. It felt right.” Run that…
