To cover “Jolene” is to stand in a very long, very deep shadow, yet with their new single, Sugarfoot have brought their own strange and compelling light. This isn’t the familiar, simmering confrontation we know. Stripped of its country gallop and rebuilt around the stark, lonely-sounding architecture of Graeme Park’s piano, the song is transformed from a desperate challenge into a haunting, prayer-like surrender.
The real genius here is in the twin vocals. Sarah Capstick and Ailsa McIntosh don’t trade lines or harmonise in a traditional sense; their voices seem to braid together, creating a single plea woven from two sources of despair.
It creates this peculiar, disorienting effect, as if one person’s internal monologue has fractured into a chorus of sorrow. There’s a theatrical helplessness to it all that, for a moment, made me think not of a bar room, but of a 17th-century painting—one of those dramatic scenes of a supplicant kneeling before a monarch, bathed in a light they cannot hope to possess themselves.
This Jolene isn’t just a rival; she is a cosmic force, an arbiter of fate. The narrator has already lost the battle before the first note is played. What we’re hearing is not a fight for a partner, but a fragile negotiation for the right to even exist in their world anymore, a plea sent up into the vast, indifferent dark.
Sugarfoot’s rendition doesn’t replace the original; it creates a ghost that haunts it. What does a person do the moment after they’ve laid their entire world at a rival’s feet and simply walked away?
