“Probably that my musical identity is much broader than I once thought it was. When you’re younger, there’s often enormous pressure to define yourself. Are you a blues artist? A folk artist? A singer-songwriter? Americana? Acoustic? Electric? The industry likes boxes because boxes are useful for selling things. I’ve gradually become much less interested in the box.”

Sunjay: Split The Sheets… with Love

On his new album, Split The Sheets (2026), singer/guitarist Sunjay culls a treasure trove of love songs from the past seven decades and puts them all through a blues-soul-americana groove, breathing new life into each and every one. Employing an approach that these songs were all meant to be collected together for this album, his interpretations of classics from an array of songwriting legends from across the musical spectrum brings them all into focus in a wholly new light. His tenth album, and the final chapter in a trilogy of releases honoring his influences (begun in 2022 with Black & Blues Revisited, continued with 2024’s I'm Just Like You), Split The Sheets celebrates all the aspects of love - good and bad - and is Sunjay's most complete album to date. He didn't just carefully curate these tracks, he let them move in, have a drawer in the dresser and keep their toothbrush in the bathroom.

(Photo: Sunjay)

They inhabited his soul the way any meaningful relationship should, and the results speak for themselves. And while these 14 gems all have his distinct sonic footprint, their roots are never fully obscured. Split The Sheets strikes that perfect balance between honoring your influences and trusting your instincts to make things definitively your own. Love songs are sexy, but the confidence to embrace them, interpret them and make them work on a grand scale is sexier.

Interview by Michael Limnios                     Special Thanks: Larry Kay (Night Train PR)

You chose 14 love songs spanning seven decades for Split The Sheets. What was the moment when you realized that these particular songs could belong together on one album?

It wasn’t really one lightning-bolt moment where I suddenly had fourteen titles written on the back of an envelope. The idea started much more simply. I’d done a Valentine’s livestream and found myself thinking about love songs as a body of work, rather than just individual songs. There are millions of them, of course, so that immediately presents a fairly ridiculous problem: where on earth do you start?

What interested me was that “love song” covers such an enormous amount of emotional territory. We tend to hear the phrase and think of candlelight, romance and happy endings, but love isn’t remotely that tidy. It’s attraction, lust, devotion, jealousy, comfort, frustration, regret, loss. Sometimes it arrives carrying flowers; sometimes it appears with a solicitor. Once I realised the record could acknowledge all of that, rather than being fourteen versions of “I love you”, it opened everything up.

Then it became about whether the songs could live together musically. I didn’t want a compilation of unrelated covers held together by a theme. I wanted it to feel like an album. That’s a very different thing. So the arrangements became part of the selection process. Could I hear a way into the song? Could I find something in it that sounded like me? Could it sit alongside everything else without losing its own identity?

Some are well known, some less so. There’s Jimmy Reed, Townes Van Zandt, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley, Lyle Lovett, Chris Smither, Stan Rogers, Stephen Bruton. On paper, that’s quite a strange dinner party. But once we got into the studio, they began to feel like they belonged in the same room.

You describe the album as a collection of songs that you wanted to put your own spin on. What is the biggest challenge in taking a song people already know and making it genuinely feel like yours?

The biggest challenge is finding the point at which respect for the original becomes fear of it.

If you love a recording, it’s very easy to become too reverential. You start treating every little detail as sacred because that’s how you first fell in love with the song. But if I’m going to reproduce somebody else’s arrangement faithfully, there’s not really much point in me making the record. The original already exists and, in most cases, was made rather well! So I have to get past that and ask what it is that I respond to. Sometimes it’s a lyric. Sometimes it’s a groove. Sometimes it’s two bars of melody or a particular tension between the vocal and the chords. Once I know what that is, I can start dismantling everything around it.

The difficulty is that there’s a line between reinterpretation and cleverness for cleverness’ sake. I never want somebody listening to think, “Oh, look how differently he’s arranged this.” I want the arrangement to feel inevitable once you hear it. I want the production to serve the song. That’s the goal. If somebody knows the original, I want them to recognise the song immediately, but perhaps twenty seconds later realise they’re somewhere they didn’t expect to be.

“What interested me was that “love song” covers such an enormous amount of emotional territory. We tend to hear the phrase and think of candlelight, romance and happy endings, but love isn’t remotely that tidy. It’s attraction, lust, devotion, jealousy, comfort, frustration, regret, loss.” (Photo: Sunjay)

You’ve said that rhythm is often the initial spark for you. When you approach a classic song, do you usually hear a new groove first, or does the lyric and story lead the way?

Very often it is the rhythm. I’ve always been quite physical in the way I play. Even solo, there’s a lot happening rhythmically between the guitar, the vocal and, quite literally, my feet. I’m fascinated by what happens if you change the rhythmic centre of a song without changing its emotional centre. A groove can completely alter the way a lyric lands. A line can feel sorrowful in one setting, defiant in another, sensual in another. That fascinates me. But the lyric ultimately has veto power. You can come up with the cleverest groove in the world and, if it fights what the song is actually saying, it’s wrong.

So rhythm might get me through the front door, but then I sit with the words. What is this person actually saying? Who are they talking to? Are they saying it sincerely? Are they wounded? Angry? Amused? Resigned? That determines how far I can push the arrangement. With Split The Sheets, we went from very intimate acoustic moments to Hammond organ, screaming harmonica, slide guitar, heavy grooves and fairly full-on rock ’n’ roll. But all of that had to be justified by the song.

There’s always a “core nugget” of the original song that you want to preserve. How do you decide what must remain untouched and what you can completely reinvent?

It’s instinctive more than scientific, but every great song has something you can’t remove without breaking it. Sometimes that’s the lyric, obviously. Sometimes it’s a melodic phrase. Sometimes it’s a riff. Sometimes there’s a rhythmic hook buried in the original that is almost the song’s DNA. I think of it almost like restoring an old building. You can change the furniture, knock through a wall, repaint everything and put an extension on the back, but there’s probably one beam you really shouldn’t remove unless you want the entire thing in the garden.

That beam is what I’m looking for. Once I know what it is, everything else is negotiable. There are tracks on this record where we moved quite a long way from the version people may know, but I never wanted to lose the thing that made me love the song in the first place. That’s the balance: enough familiarity that the emotional memory survives, but enough invention that there’s a reason for this version to exist.

Love songs can easily become sentimental, but Split The Sheets embraces both the beautiful and the painful sides of love. Did working on these songs change the way you think about love or relationships?

I’m not sure it changed the way I think about love so much as made me notice how contradictory it is. We like neat narratives. You meet somebody, you fall in love, everything works out. Or it doesn’t, and therefore the relationship was somehow a failure. Real life isn’t remotely that clean. Some relationships can be incredibly meaningful and still not last. You can love somebody and be furious with them. You can miss somebody while knowing you shouldn’t be together. You can have enormous tenderness and enormous frustration in the same relationship. That’s far more interesting to me than sentimentality.

The songs on the album ended up reflecting that without me deliberately engineering it. “That’s Love” is joyous and physical. “It Must Be Love” is warm and uncomplicated. Then you’ve got “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again”, which is almost the opposite proposition. “Killing The Blues” has an entirely different emotional temperature again. Perhaps what making the record reinforced for me is that love isn’t one emotion. It’s a container for an awful lot of them. Which is probably why people have managed to write several million songs about it without exhausting the subject.

“If you love a recording, it’s very easy to become too reverential. You start treating every little detail as sacred because that’s how you first fell in love with the song. But if I’m going to reproduce somebody else’s arrangement faithfully, there’s not really much point in me making the record.” (Photo: Sunjay)

This is your tenth album and the final chapter of a trilogy that began with Black & Blues Revisited and continued with I’m Just Like You. Looking back at the three albums, what have they taught you about your own musical identity?

Probably that my musical identity is much broader than I once thought it was. When you’re younger, there’s often enormous pressure to define yourself. Are you a blues artist? A folk artist? A singer-songwriter? Americana? Acoustic? Electric? The industry likes boxes because boxes are useful for selling things. I’ve gradually become much less interested in the box.

Black & Blues Revisited was me looking very directly at some of the music that shaped me. I’m Just Like You was an homage to Chris Smither, who has been enormously important to me musically. Then Split The Sheets widened the lens considerably. Without doubt it’s the most sonically adventurous album I’ve made to date. 

When I listen to this album, I can hear blues, folk, country, soul, rock ’n’ roll, Americana, pop - all sorts of things. But strangely, because it contains more influences, it sounds more like me than anything I’ve done. That’s perhaps the biggest lesson of the trilogy. Your identity isn’t necessarily what’s left after you remove your influences. It’s what happens when all those influences pass through you and come out the other side. Ten albums in, I’m much more comfortable with that.

You quote Waylon Jennings on the importance of eventually making a cover song your own. At what point do you know that you’ve stopped simply interpreting a song and actually made it part of your own musical voice?

When I stop thinking about the original. That’s probably the simplest answer. At the beginning, the original recording is often sitting in the room with you, metaphorically speaking. You’re aware of the singer’s phrasing, the guitar part, the tempo, the things you loved about it. Then gradually that disappears. There’s a point in rehearsal or recording where I’m no longer thinking, “How did they do this?” I’m thinking, “How do we do this?”

That’s when it becomes mine. The other test is playing it live. Once a song survives being onstage with me for a while, it changes again. Phrasing shifts. Tempos breathe. Certain lines become more important. The audience teaches you things about songs too. Eventually you can almost forget that it wasn’t yours to begin with. I think that’s what Waylon was getting at. At some point you stop asking permission from the original recording. You make a noise in your own way.

After ten albums, you’ve clearly developed a distinctive sound of your own. When you look ahead, do you feel more drawn to continuing to reinterpret the music that shaped you, or are you ready to leave the familiar territory behind and explore something completely new?

Thank you, that’s a real compliment.  I’m ready for the next thing. I’ll always play other people’s songs. I love interpreting songs too much to ever completely abandon that, and some of the greatest singers and musicians in history built careers around interpretation. But Split The Sheets feels like the natural end of this particular chapter. The trilogy has allowed me to really explore where I came from musically. I think I’ve now said what I wanted to say about those influences in record form.

What excites me next is taking everything I’ve learned from these records - particularly arrangement, production, groove and storytelling - and applying it more directly to my own writing. That doesn’t mean suddenly abandoning blues or folk or rock ’n’ roll and making an experimental Bulgarian techno album. Although, never say never. It means trusting that the musical language is mine now. I don’t have to keep pointing back towards where I learned it. That feels like quite an exciting place to be after ten albums.

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(Photo: Sunjay)