“I was ready to move on to something a little different, something else to light the fire in my belly. I’ve been acting since I was a baby, so it was like, okay, you can do something else now. And I’m lucky that I have something else to do,” says Amy Irving.
Across the arc of her 60-year long career, the Academy Award-nominated actress has discerningly crafted a captivatingly eclectic resume, from Shakespeare to Carrie, Arthur Miller to Yentl, Chekhov to Crossing Delancey. Though she was looking for a change of pace, she never anticipated that her 2023 debut album, Born In A Trunk, would be anything more than a one-off, let alone the next chapter of her storied career. For starters, there was the performance aspect of it all. “I grew up learning how to be an actor. I’ve been on the stage since I was nine months old,” she says. “I trained my whole life to do that.” Singing—where one is performing as oneself, without the mask of a character—brought up a stage fright she had learned to keep mostly at bay as an actor.
And while Irving is drawn to new creative experiences, she wasn’t exactly looking for a new career, either. “I’m not ambitious. It’s not like I want to become a big musical star,” she explains. “I like to climb Mount Everest, but my favorite thing is getting to the other side.” The endeavor, she told her music manager, producer, and son Gabriel Barreto, would only continue as long as it was fun—and fun it became. The challenge, the opportunity to learn, the ability to step out of her comfort zone and continue to grow as an artist at this stage in her life—that she enjoyed. “It’s so wonderful to be a student,” Irving says. “I don’t have to come in knowing what I’m doing.” She didn’t not know what she was doing for long. The stage terror subsided; the thrill she felt exploring new terrain grew. When the opportunity arose to do a second album, she said yes.
Always Will Be, Irving’s stunningly inventive follow-up, out April 25, 2025 via Queen Of The Castle Records, marketed and distributed by Missing Piece Records, picks up where Born In A Trunk left off. After hearing the album’s reimagined version of “I’m Waiting Forever,” a song Willie Nelson had written for Irving after meeting her on the set of 1980’s Honeysuckle Rose, the country icon was inspired. Nelson reached out to his longtime friend with a proposition: Why not record another album, one entirely of his own work? “I knew she’d probably do a lot of my songs and I knew they’d be good. You know, I’m just an old hustler,” Nelson said with a laugh. Irving took him up on the offer, collaborating again with bandleader Goolis (Jules David Bartkowski) to pare down a list of 50 options from the songwriter’s oeuvre to 10 electrifying, genre-defying tracks.
Much like its predecessor, Always Will Be continues to tell the story of Irving’s life. Every song has a story, and though they may be penned by someone else, Irving regales each as if her own. “One of my other favorite things about her is that she’s a phenomenal actor, and the way that we’ve found to work together really marries the worlds of music and theater—by making arrangements that span from punk rock to samba—we get to imagine characters for her to play,” says Goolis.
And does she play them well across the album’s ten genre-hopping tracks, opening up Nelson’s songbook not only to new arrangements, but new interpretations, as well. “I Guess I’ve Come to Live Here in Your Eyes,” written about her by Nelson—“when we first met to do Honeysuckle Rose, he looked at me and he noticed that both of us have eyes set far apart, and he said, “I do believe you and I are going to see eye to eye,” she explains—finds itself reimagined as a French pop duet with Chris Pierce. Duetting with Amy Helm, Irving transforms “Always Will Be” into a bittersweet swing-flavored ode to her recently-passed best friend, Judy Nelson. On “Everywhere I Go”—a duet with Louis Cato (bandleader, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) set to an eccentric, world-spanning arrangement which melds the original’s Mexican influence with Klezmer and Balkan music, along with ‘70s Ethiopian jazz—Irving imagines singing to her dog, Jules, whose unconditional love and calm she can carry around with her even if she can’t literally carry the 85 pound pooch everywhere. “Getting Over You” finds itself at the intersection of The Clash and The Supremes, while the lively horn section in “Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground” mixes with a guitar solo from Willie Nelson.
Finding a musical home at Brooklyn’s Spaceman Sound recording studio, Goolis, Irving, and a 10-piece band rehearsed and recorded over a three month period, a process that was both immersive and instructive. “For a while, I didn’t have an opinion. I just listened and took in what everybody had to say and just did it,” Irving explains. But with the encouragement of Goolis and his band, Irving gained a newfound confidence as she pushed herself to try things she had never done before. She found herself communicating her ideas and thoughts about the music and noticing “Is that you talking there? What do you know about any of this?” before she realized: “I was learning what I need and what I want from the music. It’s pretty thrilling.”
Lively collaboration colors the vivid Always Will Be; in addition to Goolis and his full 10-person band, guests including Steve Earle, Amy Helm, and Lizzie No contributed vocals to the project. Much like acting, Irving found the rehearsal process both enriching and exciting. “I’m not someone who thrives on applause or attention,” she says. “The performance part of it isn’t the point. It’s the creativity that appeals to me.” Within the studio environment at Spaceman Sound, Irving and Goolis found themselves creating the kind of space in which creativity can abound, where experimentation and play were encouraged, mistakes could be made with no consequences, and everyone could rejoice in relating to and finding community in making music together. “We have an awesome feedback loop of excitement and exploration and positivity. It has been an amazing and deeply supportive experience working with her,” Goolis says. “Amy and Gabe gave us the freedom to chase down every opportunity, every lark, and idea; to touch every nook and cranny of these songs, pouring our entire heart and souls into every detail of this album.”
The thread connecting them all is not only Willie Nelson’s songwriting, but their core theme of love. “I’m a romantic person,” Irving says. “I’ve always been a romantic, and I thought the songs had a trajectory—of the first meeting to the end—through relationships. I just think the way people touch each other and connect, especially after we’ve gone through such a disconnect, touching each other’s hearts is very important.” It’s a love that isn’t strictly man-woman, or even romantic romantic. Affection, tenderness, reverence, devotion—these feelings color every one of our relationships. All corners of Irving’s life find themselves represented over the arc of Always Will Be: “My dog’s a part of it. My best friend, Judy, is a part of it. Willie, of course, is a part. My husband, of course, is part of it. That’s why I chose the songs that I did and why I did it.”
Over her prolific near-lifelong career, Amy Irving has been heralded as a “revelation” (Time), “a gifted stage actress of uncompromising integrity” (Variety) with an alluring ability “to span the full breadth of [a] character’s crazily inconsistent world” (New York Times) that is “difficult to forget” (Vanity Fair). She first came to prominence with early screen roles in Brian DePalma’s Carrie and The Fury, and stage performances of Romeo and Juliet with the Los Angeles Free Shakespeare Society and Broadway’s Amadeus. Nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Yentl, Irving has captivated audiences with beloved starring roles in films like Crossing Delancey, Honeysuckle Rose, The Competition, and Micki and Maude.
On Always Will Be, Irving crafts an arresting work that couples her gift for dynamic storytelling with her talent for bringing unexpected and inspiring interpretations to the works of others with great nuance and depth. Shifting into music, the playground may look slightly different, but the creative impulse, and deep dedication to craft, remains. “I’m finding something new,” Irving says, “And, boy, there’s nothing that makes you feel more alive.”