Premiere: Luke Underhill casts heartache to the stars with ‘Goodbye, Mary Jane’ lyric video

With the fading of the leaves and summer’s last exasperated breathe, so our memories crumble and fall to the ground. The atmosphere melts from rosy pinks and purples to weathered oranges, browns and blood-shot reds. And our bittersweet memories of summer flings will become buried and tucked away beneath autumn’s suffocating but warm cloak. Thick, white, fluffy layers of snow will come soon after, and those trinkets of time we once adored only dwindle further from our consciousness. “I should have never asked your name,” Chicago’s soul spinner Luke Underhill admits with “Goodbye, Mary Jane,” off his 2017 EP The Left Side. His wounds are still fresh in taught bandages, and while his voice is stunningly wistful, it doesn’t last for long before it hardens in place.

Wiping away the drum kit and slowing down the song’s heartbeat, Underhill hones in on the backbone of splendid piano work. It’s within that stark luminescence where he rediscovers the full extent of his voice, and even as he looks back with clarity, tears well up in his eyes, and his lips quiver in measured ripples. The acoustic rendering, now with a starlit backdrop for a lyric video, premiering today, appears to burn even brighter through the cosmos and puncture the air from his lungs. “Who doesn’t love stripped down versions of songs? With the positive feedback I have received from ‘Goodbye MaryJane,’ I wanted to let the listeners in on how it originally sounded when I first wrote it. I think it it gives a new perspective when it’s slowed down,” he tells B-Sides & Badlands of the new version, which highlights his primal instincts with melody and rhythm.

“Goodbye, Mary Jane” dances between candlelight and the watchful eye of the heavens, penetrating our everyday lives with a holy, nearly baptismal, spray. Underhill sneaks his voice along the song’s groove with a soothing elegance, and we feel every ounce of his pain. “I saved all the notes you wrote / I keep them all inside of my coat,” he sings, his confessions somehow cutting even deeper than before. He reasons that he’ll never really, fully be free from the arms of his lover, who has since vanished from sight and left him damaged on the cold, hard ground.

Watch below:

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