Margaret Glaspy will return this Friday, September 12 with The Golden Heart Protector, a new project featuring seven covers and collaborations with friends including Norah Jones, Julian Lage, Madison Cunningham, Andrew Bird, and Alam Khan. Today she is excited to share her rendition of Jackson Browne’s “These Days (feat. James Bay).”
James Bay says:
Margaret and I met back in 2016, I reached out as a huge fan of her record Emotions And Math. We were playing the same festival and though we were on different stages at the same time, she sent a signed copy of her record to my dressing room. We’ve been friends ever since! In 2024 Margaret was in London playing some solo shows; she asked if she knew anyone who might be able to open up the show. I asked if I could and she said yes! We decided it would be fun to do a cover song together and we found These Days on a playlist of hers and thought it could make for a cool duet so we worked out a version that afternoon and that evening we played it live. We loved duetting and agreed it would be fun to capture it in the studio some time. At the end of 2024 we happened to be in LA at the same time and Margaret was working with Ryan Lerman in the studio. Margaret and I realised this was our chance to record These Days, she invited me over and we captured it in just a couple hours! The rest is history! I’m so grateful to Margaret for her friendship and inspiration, I’m such a huge fan of her work.
The tracklisting for The Golden Heart Protector is completed by six other songs reimagined through Glaspy’s singular lens, including her recently released version of Wilco’s “Jesus, Etc.” featuring Norah Jones, alongside selections from Magnetic Fields, Lucinda Williams, Rufus Wainwright, Blake Mills, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Each performance offers a new emotional texture while remaining true to the spirit of the originals.
Margaret will be returning to the road this fall and has just announced additional dates for the run including a show in Boston, MA on November 3 and in Washington, DC on November 1. Glaspy previously announced a New York City show at Le Poisson Rouge on October 16. All shows are listed below and tickets for the new dates are on-sale Friday, Sept 12 at 12pm ET here.
The Golden Heart Protector will mark the follow up to Glaspy’s 2023 EP The Sun Doesn’t Think (ATO). Of the project she notes,
I made this record out in LA almost by accident. My dear friend Ryan Lerman and I hung out for a weekend in Los Angeles at his studio and I just kept playing songs and wonderful people kept showing up to sing and play them with me. He was the dream producer for a project like this because he just let it all happen. James Bay just happened to be in town from London on the day we were tracking, Madison Cunningham had a day off, Alam Khan is a childhood friend of my husband’s and happened to be in LA; It really was the most organic and wonderful thing. I’m such a lover of a good song and to have the opportunity to sing and celebrate all these well written tunes with all of my dear friends is really enchanting. All of the songwriters that we cover are either friends or heroes of mine and it feels special to pay homage to the legends of our time.
In 2023 Glaspy released the full-length Echo The Diamond which drew attention from the likes of The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone, among many others. That LP emerged from a deliberate stripping-away of artifice to reveal life for all its harsh truths and ineffable beauty. Like the precious gem of its title, the result is an object of startling luminosity, one capable of cutting through the most elaborately constructed façades. The albums’ singles “Act Natural,” “Memories,” and “Get Back” saw support from The New York Times, NPR,Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin, and others. “Act Natural” reached the top 20 at AAA Radio, marking Glaspy’s highest chart position of her career. The album was labeled a “notable release of the week” by both NPR and American Songwriterand Pitchfork included it in their “8 New Albums You Should Listen To” list around release and The New York Times’ Jon Pareles included “Memories” in his in Best Songs of 2023 list noting “Over a waltz of simple guitar chords, Margaret Glaspy blurts out unvarnished grief in a torn voice, bereft yet struggling to go on.”
Originally from the Northern California town of Red Bluff, Glaspy began writing songs at age 15 and quickly developed a style marked by raw sensitivity and razor-sharp insight. She began her solo career with the self-released Homeschool EP in July 2012. After signing to ATO Records in 2015, she released a 7-inch in early 2016 featuring “You and I” and “Somebody to Anybody”—songs that would later appear on her debut full-length Emotions and Math, a bold and bracing album that introduced her as a major new voice in indie rock.
