Premiere: Luke Underhill updates Lavender Diamond’s ‘Everybody’s Heart’s Breaking Now’

Songs transform. Through the passage of time, a decade or more, perhaps, or just a few months, stories collect personal meanings like dust in a long abandoned warehouse. Lavender Diamond’s “Everybody’s Heart’s Breaking Now,” originally conceived for Becky Stark’s 2012 album Incorruptible Heart, a muted pastel performance, gets not only a fresh stylistic makeover from Luke Underhill, but its timely cultural implications hang thick. Premiering today, the song discards the spacious, airy quality of the original for Underhill’s swarthier, full-chested interpretation. It crescendoes in much the same way, yet it spirals through the sky with a decorative, cosmic razzle-dazzle.

“Oh everybody’s heart’s breaking now / And you feel the world is ending somehow,” Underhill delivers the opening line with a spine-tingling frankness. “And you wonder how we’ll find our way out / Oh everybody’s heart’s breaking now.” Even though his performance reaches much further, musically, there is a gigantic sorrow that keeps him weighted down; the reality is, everybody’s hearts are truly breaking right now. The world in the throes of pandemic, such a well-timed, provocative release stings with an acidic catharsis and yields great reflection.

“I was immediately drawn to this song. I did not pick it, it picked me,” writes Underhill to B-Sides & Badlands over email. “I love this song. I’m happy I was able to put my spin on it and hopefully it hits others like the original hit me.”

The visual, directed by Pat Barraza and shot between Nashville and LA locations, features country upstart Lyla Joyce in a gripping performance. Cut between onstage camera work, Joyce holes up in her apartment, bowing her head in prayer and perhaps expresses the collective anxiety soaking throughout society.  “Lyla and I met writing in Nashville and really bonded,” adds Underhill. “When I played her this song she fell in love with and agreed to play the muse.”

Underhill’s “Everybody’s Heart’s Breaking Now” is timely, reverent, heartbreaking. And we could all use it right about now.

Watch below:

Follow Underhill on his socials: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Website