When I started shaping the artwork for Ghost 2.0, I kept circling back to one of my favourite covers – Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse’s Valerie. There’s something timeless about it: the torn paper edges, that mix of colour and shadow, the raw soul of Amy’s voice spilling through production that feels both retro and modern. It captures what I wanted for Ghost 2.0 – reflection, nostalgia, and a bit of grit under the polish.
Most people know Valerie as an Amy Winehouse song, but it actually began with Liverpool band The Zutons in 2006. Frontman Dave McCabe wrote it about an American woman named Valerie Star, his ex-girlfriend who’d planned to move to the UK before a string of driving offences stopped her. The lyrics – “Did you have to go to jail, put your house up for sale…” – were quite literal. When Ronson and Winehouse reimagined it a year later, they turned a very specific story into something universal: longing, regret, and the messiness of love.
Valerie Star herself later told Vice that she still can’t listen to the song without feeling strange. “It’s kind of surreal,” she said. “I can’t keep the song on my shuffle playlist… I feel like it would come up at the most awkward times. Like, hey, just listening to a song about myself – don’t mind me.”
That blend of truth, irony, and reinvention hooked me. The idea that a song – and even its artwork – can travel through different lives and still hold emotional truth feels close to what Ghost 2.0 stands for. My artwork borrows that torn-paper aesthetic from Valerie, but filters it through a different lens: what happens when you peel back layers of identity, nostalgia, and self-image to see what’s really there.
It struck me that Ghost 2.0 mirrors Valerie in more ways than one. Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse took a song that already existed – The Zutons’ Valerie, released just a year earlier – and reimagined it with new life and emotion. It wasn’t about erasing the original; it was about revealing another layer that had always been there, waiting to be heard.
That’s what this version of Ghost is for me. It’s the same song at its core, but it breathes differently now. I sometimes wonder if The Zutons could go back in time, would they reimagine Valerie themselves? Maybe not to compete with what came after, but to reclaim it – to express how it felt watching their own creation take on a second life.
That’s the beauty of art. Once it’s out in the world, it evolves. Ghost 2.0 is me doing exactly that – revisiting something I already made, not to fix it, but to let it speak in a new voice. GHOST2.0 will be released in January 2026.