Released on September 16 2022, Amy Ray’s album If It All Goes South features a collaboration with Brandi Carlile, called Subway.
Continuing a friendship that goes back over a decade Brandi Carlile provides vocals on the track.
Discussed in this review, it says
One song, “Subway,” was as much a product of COVID as anything on the album. With its chorus, “‘Don’t take the subway, baby, let’s just walk,’ we’d say, ’til our longing turns to day / Remember when Alphabet City was a wilderness to you and me, before Rudy had his way,” it’s about a New York City in actual and emotional flux for Ray.
“If there’s any city I miss, it’s Berlin or New York,” she says, but at the time she could only think of New York as a site of conflict and loss. DJ Rita Houston was a friend who died from cancer during that time, and many people she knew were isolated in their apartments. At the same time, the Black Lives Matter marches and the reasons for the protests combined in her mind to make it seem like a very different city from the one she remembered.
