Emily Lacy & Soft Sailors - "I'll Stand By You" (Pretenders Cover) by Soft Sailors published on 2021-05-17T21:11:08Z "As 2020 closed in around all of us last spring, I found myself in the fortunate position of living a couple doors away from Emily Lacy, a tremendously talented musician I’ve known for more than a decade and a half. Emily is a folk singer - her version of Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me” might be the best one that exists - and she’s also adept at using looping pedals to create immersive, mediative vocal soundscapes. Last year, maybe a month before the pandemic, Emily moved into the same quadplex apartment building as me. When everything shut down, I became deeply grateful to be in close proximity to such a creative force. For a couple of months, she livestreamed her daily musical practice sessions, which were a combination of vocal exercises along with explorations of songs she was learning. Among those was The Pretenders’ “I’ll Stand By You,” a song I’d forgotten from my earliest days of watching MTV but which resonated deeply in the present tense. As I studied the song along with Emily, I became enamored of the song’s structure (the key change… my god) and decided that we should try to record a cover together. Even though we lived just a few feet away from eachother, due to Covid precautions we recorded ourselves separately. She recorded all of her vocals by herself over a basic MIDI version I gave her of the backing track, and once she was done with that I built the arrangement around her by adding beats, guitars, an electric organ, and eventually my own voice. It was a fun reversal of the normal recording process. although I had a hard time deciding when it was 'finished.' I think it is now! Soft Sailors is a lifestyle." -Geoff Genre Folk & Singer-Songwriter