The premiere of Catey Shaw’s cover of American Girl has us head over heels.
International Women’s Day this year saw the launch of Instant Love, a collaborative project hatched by Allison Zatarain and Richard Gottehrer from Instant Records, which sees female vocalists hash out classic male-sung songs about women, without changing the pronouns.
The latest, a cover of Tommy Petty and the Heartbreakers’ ‘American Girl’ by out Brooklyn-based bisexual singer-songwriter Catey Shaw, shows exactly how removing the male gaze from the story can unlock new layers to the lyrics.
“It was an interesting challenge to find a song that could be flipped a bit with a change in vocalist. It’s funny how different the lyrics sound when read in an unfamiliar voice. I always knew Tom Petty’s ‘American Girl’ as a happy classic song, so when Jay Levine and I sat down and dissected it a bit it was surprising to find this kind of sadness. There seemed to be such an innocence about it, which now reads as a poignant contrast to the world as we now know it,” Shaw told Highlight Magazine.
.jpg)
Instant Love, in partnership with The Orchard, will release a new song every two weeks with a dynamic female vocalist from a range of genres, alongside original artwork by Rebecca Morehiser. The playlist already boasts covers of The Eagles, The Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, and The Doors.
Click here to listen to American Girl and the rest of the Instant Love soundtrack.