This powerful song from Maya de Vitry comes from the upcoming album ‘The Only Moment‘ which is out on July 12th. Powerful but not completely new – co-written between de Vitry and Caitlin Canty, the tune has been around for a few years now—there’s a version on Canty’s 2023 album ‘Quiet Flame‘ and on Della Mae’s 2020 release, ‘Headlight.’ Maya de Vitry wanted her own version to be recorded once she had the right band for it, as she explains: “I really wanted to do this one justice, for this song to feel as alive and exuberant as I think it wants to be – and I just honestly couldn’t find that in myself for a while. But this finally felt like the perfect band and moment in my own life for me to sing this one. I feel especially lucky to have my friend Phoebe Hunt singing harmony. She’s on the whole record, but on this song I just think she’s absolute magic.”
The song had a powerful original inspiration – the tale of kicking against the jams and not letting others get in your way was inspired by the legendary Sharon Jones [as an aside – one of the finest gigs this writer ever experienced was the indomitable Sharon Jones with the Dap Kings, and Charles Bradley as support – never has The Barbican ever moved before or since like it did on that night!]. It was ,de Vitry explains, like this : “when Caitlin showed up to my house, I had a Rolling Stone magazine on my kitchen table and I had just been reading this article about Sharon Jones, about how she was living with Stage 4 cancer and alternating between recovering from chemotherapy and performing because live music was a place she could actually make the pain disappear.” In that Rolling Stone article, Jones shared how tough the music industry had been on her throughout her non-traditional career. A line stuck out to de Vitry in which a producer once told Jones that she was “too fat, too black, too short, and too old.”
“This song is inspired by her sense of fight, and her devotion to music in spite of the odds that were stacked against her in so many ways,” says de Vitry. “She didn’t let those gatekeepers stop her.”
