Amandla Stenberg may only be 18 years old, but she has already proven herself to be a woman of many, many talents. After demonstrating her acting chops as Rue in the massively popular film adaptation of The Hunger Games (2012) and as a younger version of Zoe Saldana's character in Colombiana (2011), Stenberg has earned some activist cred for her stance against cultural appropriation with her “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows" video, and helmed a comic book series with diversity as its main agenda. Dazed Magazine declared her "one of the most incendiary voices of her generation" in 2015, but mainstream music listeners had to wait until 2017 to hear her breathtaking singing voice. (Dedicated fans would have heard her singing via her 2015 EP as one-half of indie folk-rock duo Honeywater, or during her participation in California's Rock STAR Music Education program).
Stenberg reinvented Mac DeMarco's "Let My Baby Stay" for the Everything, Everything (2017) sountrack. The film was an adaptation of a YA novel by Nicola Yoon, featuring a young girl (with an immuno-deficiency disease that shelters her away) who falls in love with the boy next door. The movie earned middling reviews on Rotten Tomatoes: "Everything, Everything should tug young adult heartstrings fairly effectively, but may not be quite engrossing enough to woo less melodramatically inclined viewers". Stenberg's cover, however, is a memorable performance that might make you excited about the possibility of a debut album.
The hand clap-esque beats help speed up DeMarco's introspective verses, leaving more time for the plea in the song's chorus to firmly sink in: 'So please don’t take my love away/Let my baby stay'. The ironic quality of the Canadian slacker-rocker's lo-fi aesthetic is stripped away, replaced with a hypnotic R&B song engineered for the after-hours. The polished and minimalist production lets Stenberg's vocals shine, sparkle and gleam with its delicate appeal for romantic continuity.
