History Repeats

Album: Jaime (2019)
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Songfacts®:

  • The lead single from Jaime, "History Repeats" is also the oldest song on the album. In early 2017, Brittany Howard was showing a friend how she uses her recording software. In piecing things together in a demo, Howard came up with the song. She totally forgot about it until she found the track a couple years later.
  • This was the most difficult song on Jaime to record. Howard told HMV: "The drums are intense and mixing it was even more of a challenge."
  • Howard said regarding the song's meaning: "'History Repeats' is as much a personal song as it is a song about us as a human species. Our times of success may propel us forward, but our repeating failures hold us back from evolving into harmony."
  • The album is named for Howard's elder sister who died from retinoblastoma in 1998, aged just 13. The singer told Mojo magazine: "Spiritually that's someone I feel, even though they're not here. Most of my memories of my sister are of her teaching me something. Getting to talk about her, and how meaningful her presence in my life was, and it's not being a thing of, like, sadness, it felt like the right thing to do. She was one of those people, she never complained about anything. When she lost her vision, she still created art. That puts everything into perspective. I like sharing who she was with people."

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