Candy is a song that has always carried one of rock music’s crueler realizations: sometimes you do not discover the size of a love until the relationship has already become an archaeological site. By 1990, Iggy Pop had spent enough years writing about appetite, danger, boredom, sex, survival, and self-destruction to know that regret could be every bit as physical as desire. His duet with Kate Pierson turned that knowledge into one of the strangest hits of his career, a breakup song where memory keeps rewriting the emotional ledger after everybody has gone home.
Jenny Bates and Andrea Sicco step into that old argument with an advantage: their voices already seem built for opposing sides of the same conversation.
Sicco comes from the noirish New York underworld of Twin Guns, The Disappearing Act, and The Art Gray Noizz Quintet, bringing a low, smoky vocal tone with a measured, lived-in gravity. Bates, meanwhile, draws from Bunny X, Diamond Field, and her years in musical theatre, singing with clarity, warmth, and enough force to meet Sicco on equal footing. Their voices occupy different registers, but neither dominates; the appeal comes from hearing two distinct personalities carry the same regret from opposite ends.
Candy is about realizing too late that somebody mattered more than you knew at the time. The relationship is gone, but the feeling has become clearer in retrospect, which is one of life’s meaner tricks. Iggy sings from inside that recognition, looking back at a love he failed to understand while he had it, while Kate Pierson’s voice gives the memory another dimension, as if the past itself has answered him. The song is less about reunion than irreversibility: the knowledge that love can remain vivid long after the chance to do anything about it has disappeared.
Together, Bates and Sicco make Candy feel less like a museum-piece cover and more like two adults reopening a letter they probably should have burned years ago. The emotional machinery remains brutally simple. Somebody mattered. The realization came late, but time kept moving anyway. They lean into that ache without smothering it: Sicco gives the verses a weathered intimacy, while Bates brings an open, commanding presence that gives the exchange its lift. When their voices meet, the contrast feels conversational, with each singer carrying a different shade of the same recognition. The guitar brings a slight western menace, while the synth elements widen the space around the vocals without turning the arrangement into period cosplay.
Recording the track at Sear Sound adds another layer of accidental poetry. Iggy Pop recorded there, and Bates and Sicco now enter the same building to reinterpret one of his best-known songs, surrounded by hallway notes, drawings, and decades of New York musical history. These hallowed, yellowed rooms have also hosted the likes of David Bowie, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Tina Turner, and U2, giving the session the peculiar feeling of taking place inside a working archive rather than some embalmed monument to rock history. (In fact, the personnel there agree: it is still very much a place of action and not a museum!) The accompanying video, filmed by Alice Teeple and Jenny Bates, keeps the camera close to that atmosphere, catching the pair at work inside a studio whose walls have absorbed more than their share of famous voices.
Watch the video below:
Some songs survive because everybody remembers the chorus. Candy survives because everybody eventually becomes the person who wishes they had known then what they know now.
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