Maggie Rose regularly nods to her inspirations in her original recordings, bridging soul, rock, country, and funk alike on the 2021 album Have a Seat. Rose goes straight to one of the sources for a swirling, trippy cover of Rock Hall of Famer Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” that was released on Friday.
The track premiered earlier this week on SiriusXM’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame station, for which Rose did a takeover to play music by some of her heroes.
In its original form, King’s is a soulful stomper that leads off the classic album Tapestry. In Rose’s reimagining, it’s ethereal folk-rock that travels into the psychedelic headspace of Tame Impala and even Mazzy Star. Rose delivers her lines in a steady, burnished croon — a bit country, a bit rock & roll — and adds her own inflections to the melody. The 5-minute version swells to a mass of echoing vocals and reverb to give it a darker tinge.
“We cut our version in the middle of February and didn’t shy away from the darkness we were all feeling, but that made the process cathartic,” Rose said in a release. “It is simply an amazing song that brought us all back together during an extraordinary time.”
Rose recorded Have a Seat at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with Alabama Shakes’ Ben Tanner serving as producer. She has live dates ahead through the end of the year, including a Dec. 9 show at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn and a Dec. 19 stop at Brooklyn Bowl in Nashville.