As the celebration of True Groove Records 10th Anniversary continues, the True Groove All-Stars have collaborated in a “We Are The World”-like fashion to produce an energetic and uplifting spin on Grace Jones’ iconic personal anthem ‘Livin’ My Life‘. The song was recorded over the course of nine or ten months, from mid-2019 to early 2020, with contributions from almost every artist in the True Groove family, and the globally socially distanced video was recorded in the US and Europe over the past few months.
Amplifying the island vibe on the original (which was recorded in the Bahamas), this version offers a bouncing beat that encompasses ska, rock and funk and strikes a timeless groove. “The idea hit me over a year ago,” says True Groove Records founder and All-Stars bandleader Tomás Doncker:
“We’re all huge Grace Jones fans, and I’ve always thought it was such a cool song. Plus, the idea of covering her is so weird; she’s so unique that she’s hard to cover. On the other hand, she’s someone who puts a very original spin on other people’s songs so she has her own covers tradition. I knew it would be a fun project. We had some downtime in the studio one day last year and came up with the groove that we knew we could build on. Sam Huber was in the studio a little later, and I suggested he take a pass at it. Then Marla (Mase). And so on, it just grew from there. Pretty much everyone on the label knew the song (or was aware of it), but I specifically told everyone not to learn it; just do it, let it flow. So over the course of almost a year it became an organized jam session that everyone in the True Groove family contributed to. James (Dellatacoma, True Groove in-house engineer and studio wizard) made sense of it and put it all together. Then 2020 happened. The pandemic, social unrest, resurgent racism—all these things have changed our existence and thrown humanity into a freefall. Nothing is normal. So what’s left? Sadly some people are paralyzed by it, but we are going forward and living our lives as boldly and as powerfully as we always have and can, and this song, which we had already been working on, turned out to be the perfect representation of that, and a great stand to take. Then came the video. We thought, ‘how do we make this happen while everyone is locked away (so to speak)?’. So we came up with a solution – get everyone on the track to shoot their own footage with their cell phones, and then have cult filmmaker Dylan Mars Greenberg (and Tate Hoffmaster) put it all together. Dylan is a brilliant editor. (She worked editing for Troma for about 3 years and has shot a lot of our live performances and music videos) She went back into our archives and cherry-picked some beautiful unreleased video footage, combined it with everything else, and composed the video. (She sings on the track as well.) There’s a certain irreverence and defiance that comes through on the record and it’s emphasized even more so on the video; regardless of what’s happening in the world, we are living our lives, our way.”
