Album Review: Sophie Jamieson - I Still Want to Share

Welcome, little one. Don’t drink too much just ‘cause

And two years ago, in reading about Sophie Jamieson’s debut full-length, Choosing, I did, of course, find the composition of the cover art to be alluring—the bright white border surrounding an obscured photo of Jamieson’s face—she’s behind the white bars of a gate, or fence of some kind, and the bars themselves are tinted in appearance so there is both a literal and figurative chill to them, creating a kind of icy, unnerving feeling the longer you meet Jamieson’s gaze, from what she is hiding behind. 

Two years ago, in reading about Sophie Jamieson’s debut full-length, I saw the phrase “fraught relationship with alcohol,” and even in the allure of the album’s stark cover, that was why I listened.

And I am often connecting, or making connections, between music and time. Or music and life. 

And, perhaps, this is something you do as well. It is, often, at least for me, and how I listen, and how I think about music, something that is unavoidable. 

When I return to an album, or even simply give consideration to an album well after it has arrived into the world, and after I’ve first listened to it, I will think about where I was when it came into my life. The year itself, and all the weight a year can hold. The time of year. And more than where I was, when I return to an album, I often find myself ruminating on who I was, and how much I may have changed, for better or worse, within the interim.

Two years ago, in reading about Sophie Jamieson’s debut full-length Choosing, I saw the phrase “fraught relationship with alcohol,” and that was why I listened.

And whenever the refrigerator in the basement shudders—the small, dorm-style, micro-fridge, the bottles resting on top of it gently clatter together. 

There are nine bottles of beer—seasonally specific beer. Idiosyncratic beer for the winter, or winter holidays. The bottles are lined up on the top of this refrigerator, stationed in the corner of the basement. And the beer has been there for well over a year—some of it maybe, even, at one point, near the end of December 2023, had found its way into the fridge, only to be taken out, in favor of other things that needed to be kept cool—the bottles, then, placed into a cardboard flat resting on top of the dull brown refrigerator. 

The cardboard flat housing things both containing alcohol and not. But all of it, more or less, left to gather dust as December turned into January and a new year began. 

And December turned into January again. 

Another new year. 

And when the compressor within the refrigerator cycles, and then shuts off, and sends a lurching shudder through itself, the nine bottles of beer gently shudder along with it, rattling and clinking together for a brief moment before they are silent again. 

The beer within the bottles, all certainly beyond the respective “best by” or “best before” dates stamped onto the labels or bottle tops. 

The beer, never even offered to guests in the house, as winter turned into spring turned into summer turned into fall turned into winter.

There are nine bottles of beer. I was uncertain what to do with them. I am still uncertain what to do with them.

I saw the phrase “fraught relationship with alcohol,” and that was why I listened.

*

At the very end of Choosing, on the song “Long Play,” Jamieson sings, “You’re only on side A,” reassuringly, both to herself, and to whomever is listening. “You’ve still got the whole long play to twist.”

I think about that a lot. In moments. When things are, perhaps, not going as well as I may wish them to be, and there is an impossibility to it all. 

I’m only on side A. I still have the whole long play. 

I think of a voice note my best friend sent to me, around the same time that I had discovered Jamieson, and was beginning to sit down with Choosing, analytically.

She said, “I need you to stay alive for forever.”

I think of a telephone conversation with my best friend, near the end of 2023. “Nobody with as many mental health problems as you have should be drinking as much as you are.”

I saw the phrase “fraught relationship with alcohol.”

I’m only on side A. I’ve still got the whole long play.

*

In sitting down with Choosing, shortly after its release, and in the time spent writing about it, as 2022 became 2023, I refer to the album as a “labor of love,” which I did, I think, for at least two reasons. The first being simply because of the time that elapsed between her haunting debut EP, Where, from 2013, and her subsequent recordings—the two EPs she self-released in 2020, then the arrival of Choosing, issued through the UK indie label Bella Union. 

A labor of love. The thing you keep doing, or working at, or working towards, even when there is an impossibility to it all. You put in the time. Because it matters to you. 

And you hope, in the end, it matters to someone else. 

In an earnest post on Instagram around the time of Choosing’s release, Jamieson explained that the album was recorded throughout 2021, and primarily financed through odd jobs, like bartending or delivering takeout food on her bicycle on her way home from the recording studio, and saving money to put into the album sessions where she could by, as she puts it, eating “a lot of baked beans and spent a lot of time in the Tesco reduced section.”

“I let go of my manager and begged a lot of people to manage me,” she continued, further elaborating on the kind of “make or break” urgency of the album, and all that had led up to it. “Then I gave up, and begged a lot of labels to listen to the record. I chased a lot of labels, heard back from very few, and felt my self-worth melting all over the floor.”

A labor of love. The thing you keep doing, or working at, or working towards.

There is an organic, intimate nature to Choosing—intentionally so, as Jamieson was unhappy with the more polished versions of the recordings three different attempts at mastering had resulted in.

A labor of love. The thing you keep doing. Even when there is an impossibility to it all. You put in the time.

I am often connecting, or making connections, between music and time. Or music and life.

I think about where I was when a specific album came into my life. The year itself, and all the weight a year can hold. The time of year. And more than where I was, I find myself ruminating on who I was, and how much I may have changed, for better or worse, within the interim. 

Two years is both a long time, and it is not.

And in foregoing a more polished final product for Choosing, there is an organic, intimate nature to it, yes, but there is also a starkness, and an intensity. It is a collection of songs that can be bleak, yes, even though it ends with a sliver of optimism—but it is dark, often harrowing, and in that, there is a kind of beauty to be found. 

And, I am remiss to describe, sonically at least, Jamieson’s follow-up to Choosing, I Still Want to Share, as polished. Working with producer Guy Massey, if anything, there is a much more lush, or robust nature to I Still Want—even with how, it, too, lyrically, is dark, and often harrowing, there is beauty to be found in the gorgeous string arrangements that underscore a number of the album’s 11 tracks, often creating moments that swell to a place that is almost overwhelming.

A collection of songs that find Jamieson primarily walking through the painful, difficult, and at times confusing conclusion of a relationship—and all the myriad emotions that come along with a separation of that magnitude, I Still Want to Share is arresting in just how evocative it is, both musically, yes, but more than the dramatic moments punctuated by string accompaniment or other subtle flourishes from the piano, but it is Jamieson’s lyricism that paints such specific and vivid portraits that absolutely haunt long after the album has come to an end. Lyricism that is both extremely personal and revealing—and just revealing enough, because there are places throughout where her writing is still vivid, yes, but fragmented and ambiguous.

A captivating and moving record from start to finish, and even before the opening track had concluded, it is clear how enormous of a statement I Still Want to Share is. Enormous for both Jamieson as a singer and songwriter, but enormous in terms of just what it chooses to explore, and what it unflinchingly reflects back at us as listeners.

*

And there is a familiarity that ripples throughout I Still Want to Share, sonically, at least. And perhaps that is due to the connected nature of the material—the fact that these songs all operate from within not the same place, but from specific moments, or feelings, rather. Many of the songs begin with Jamieson unaccompanied by anything other than the resonant, warm-sounding strings of her electric guitar, along with her voice—haunted and gorgeous, before she is joined by any other instrumentation. 

Of the album’s 11 songs, there are only a few that do not begin from this similar place—and one of the advance singles from I Still Want to Share, “How Do You Want to Be Loved,” is among those, opening instead with the quick and dexterously plucked sounds of the acoustic guitar, creating a well-paced, subtle rhythm that Jamieson’s voice then hoovers just above.

“How Do You Want to Be Loved,” in its structure, slowly builds, but it also remains in this place of tension—nearly every song on the album is like that, which heightens the kind of darkness or feeling of sorrow and unease that is woven into the lyricism. There is no release—even as additional elements are added, like the twinkling of a vintage-sounding synthesizer, and the light slapping of a percussive element, working its way into the tempo set by the sound of the guitar and creating this kind of gradual tumbling sensation that Jamieson never allows to get away from her, even as her voice, the further along in the song she pulls us, continues to rise with a sense of urgency.

And for the kind of similarities, or familiar elements that you can hear throughout I Still Want, there is a dynamism, specifically in how Jamieson uses her voice. There are moments, depending on the song, and specifically the tone of the song, where she sings from a much more sorrowful, or fragile place, and for as emotionally tumultuous as a track like “How Do You Want to Be Loved” is, there is a robust quality to it, and a surprising nature to how she controls the delivery of the words, allowing them to fall where they need to, within the rhythm of the song, rather quickly, or stretching out a syllable a little further until she finds the next moment where a word needs to plummet.

In a track-by-track breakdown of I Still Want to Share for the website Beats Per Minute, Jamieson reveals that “How Do You Want to Be Loved” is a song that exists slightly outside of the larger narrative that the album carries—confessing that it was written about a close family member with whom she had an “upsetting fight” with, as she puts it.

“I wanted to write a song that would help me forgive and understand them,” she continued. “To write my way into being able to love them in the way I felt I should. But I couldn’t keep my anger and frustration out of the song.”

Jamieson, I would contend, is not only a songwriter but a storyteller as well, simply because of the extraordinarily powerful way she uses her words. Here, on “How Do You Want,” before the growing intensity of the titular phrase arrives, there is a specific phrase that stands out amongst the others, and that does linger, and that is when she sings the expression, “love becoming learning,” which, like any impressive writer, says so much with only three words.

Throughout the song as it continues to build, Jamieson asks the question found in the title, directed presumably at this off-stage antagonist. “How do you want to be loved,” she howls, and like a lot of the questions, or even simply things to give consideration to throughout I Still Want to Share, there are no answers to be found.

If there is no direct resolution to the central conflict, or source of contention, within “How Do You Want to Be Loved,” the song itself, musically, finds resolution as its intensity recedes near its end, with Jamieson delivering what serves as a bit of a pensive epilogue, with her voice sounding much more sorrowful—a contrast to the strength, and depth, it has elsewhere.

“Head back,” she begins quietly. “Mouth in the air. I never thought I’d find you here.” Then, she repeats the first two lines again, though she changes the phrase, and with a wear exhalation as the song ends, the weight that brought her here, in the first place, still hangs. 

“Head back. Mouth in the air. I don’t know what I have to share.”

*

When am I going to break your heart?

And there are moments throughout I Still Want to Share that are simply arresting in how objectively beautiful they sound—the warm, lush string accompaniments contribute to the grand, swelling sensation that a number of the songs on the album have. But there is also beauty to be found within the way Jamieson can carry the notes, and how she uses her voice—often quiet, not, like, a whisper or anything, but she sings softly, so when she does let her vocals soar, it does create something that is surprising in just how gigantic an ascendent it can become.

I do not wish to refer to I Still Want to Share as a “breakup album,” because there is, of course, more to it than that. The often painful conclusion of romantic relationships is at the core of the album, and I think, anecdotally, songwriters will often pen lyrics that are from the perspective of the one who has been on the receiving end of the breakup. Jamieson, though, turns the lens, at least on the smoldering “Your Love is A Mirror,” onto the person who knows they need to be the one to take the initiative and end things, regardless of how difficult that might be.

“Your Love is A Mirror,” musically, is similar to a bulk of the album—which is not to say it is a good thing, or a bad thing. But there is a similarity, or familiarity, because of how often a song begins, and sometimes remains, focused on Jamieson and the pensive, warm strums of the electric guitar. And here, the song doesn’t introduce as many additional elements as is done elsewhere, though she is joined, eventually, but a mournful string accompaniment that does really punctuate the tumultuous nature of her writing.

Often, in music writing, I find myself using, or overusing certain phrases, or analytical devices as a means of continuing to write my way through the album, to arrive at the conclusion that, once I get there, I have ultimately earned. Something I return to is the idea of an album asking questions—and, I mean, yes, a lot of albums do inevitably ask questions of its listeners, but here, I am thinking more of the questions posed within the songs themselves, regardless of if there are “easy answers” for them, or not. 

“When am I going to break your heart?,” Jamieson asks, with the words gently spilling out into the air, before the sound of her guitar comes in to catch them, then continues. “I can feel it coming.”

“When are you going to watch me march right out of your loving—letting the arms around me come right apart,” she continues, with her voice rising and falling with an impressive grace, creating a bittersweet, reflective melody, with her flicks of the guitar strings kind of meandering underneath, keeping rhythm, albeit a slower and looser one.

“Your Love is A Mirror,” in how it is built, does not follow a traditional kind of “verse/chorus/verse” structure, with the words more or less unraveling behind Jamieson as she walks us through the song. But in how it is assembled, it does reach a kind of emotional climax and catharsis, where it builds and does begin to lift off within a little bit of a bridge, before it does resolve itself into a more somber conclusion—it is here where the warm undercurrent of the cello is introduced, working in tandem with the guitar to conjure something that is truly remarkable to hear. 

“Don’t try to change my mind,” Jamieson howls. Then, later, returning to this place of a soaring emotional delivery. “I’m learning every song. The chorus that’s waking me up is all that I could want—don’t tell me that I’m wrong.”

In her analysis of “Your Love,” for Beats Per Minute, Jamieson explains that she was in a “loving, healthy relationship that I did not want o be in anymore.”

“Admitting why, to myself,” she continued. “Was very difficult. On one hand, I felt that I had grown out of this particular dynamic…on the other, my relationship was at the stage where I had to really face myself in order to do the essential work…I couldn’t bear to be loved like this, because it meant I had to look at what was being loved.”

The final, evocative line of the song, then, really echoing those sentiments in a truly powerful, haunting way. 

“Your love is a mirror that I can’t look straight into.”

*

And there was never a time, I don’t think, where I was interested in objectively writing about music—I would argue that “reviewing” an album is inherently not objective, though there are ways to write your thoughts, or opinions on an album, but to not write yourself in as a character within the piece. It isn’t easy—or, at least, it’s never been easy for me the few times I have been asked to remove myself from something I had written.

I would argue that writing myself in and making my reflection on something much more personal ultimately makes something more thought-provoking or genuinely interesting to both write and read.

There was a time, I think, when I wrote less of myself in—making myself a character who is experiencing the album, I suppose. But it is, for myriad reasons, over the last five years certainly and perhaps even before that, the only way I really do care to write about music. And I tell you all of that to tell you this—as someone who writes, and often writes personally, and as someone who is always reading, I am a fan of something that burns slowly.

I am a fan of beautifully written sentences.

From how descriptive Jamieson is throughout I Still Wish to Share, she is a songwriter, yes, but also is very clearly a storyteller—and in telling stories through evocative, and at times shadowy, or fragmented imagery, there is a real literary nature to a lot of these songs with just how engrossing of a narrative she creates and sustains.

Jamieson does this early on, in the album’s stunning and captivating second track, “Vista.”

The song begins not mid-thought, but it does begin within the middle of something—with Jamieson’s narrative placing us within a moment that has already started. “And then you ask me what I’m thinking,” she sings, her voice haunted, and floating above the finger plucks of her electric guitar strings, oscillating between a kind of shimmer, and a kind of dissonance, or edge, giving the song just the slightest sense of tension, or uneasiness. 

The other elements, then, that are slowly introduced within the second verse, and beyond, of “Vista,” walk that line as well—there are low tones that surge underneath everything, controlled atmospheric squalls, and the glistening, twinkling of chimes that flutter through, all swirling around within the very intentional pacing of the song—“Vista” is similar to a lot of songs on I Still Wish to Share in the sense that it has a sort of loose or free floating structure. There is a rhythm, but it is subtle, and the song is carried through primarily by the sound of Jamieson’s guitar, and the rising and falling within the vocal melody.

The juxtaposition of things that do sound beautiful, or “lighter” in tone, and things that are much darker, or even ominous, is used as a means of complimenting Jamieson’s narrative, and the kind of confusion she writes into the lyrics, and the uncertainty and unease that is depicted so vividly—impressively so, through the use of conversational fragments, and observations about her surroundings within the moment in time we are privy to with her.

The moment we find Jamieson involves her in riding in a speeding car, traveling through what is implied to be a picturesque area, though because of the tension within the car between her and the song’s antagonist, the beauty of the world they are passing by isn’t going unnoticed, but it is perhaps not as appreciated as it might be under other circumstances.

‘When you turn around comes the clearing,” Jamieson describes. “Put the foot down—disappearing,” she adds, using a kind of subtly to indicate just how quickly the car is moving. Later, she chooses her imagery and words carefully to detail what kind of passenger she is—“Feed me coffee at the drive-in,” she says. “Watch me sleeping as you’re riding.”

“Feed me whiskey at the hotel,” she sings, with a sense of remorse in her voice, later on..

“Then you’re pulling up, parking at the viewpoint by the cliff,” Jamieson narrates, in a moment when the instrumentation, mirroring this kind of clearing, or the more expansive moment she’s describing, opens up a little more, becoming a little more majestic sounding, with the tension lessening just a little, before it is reintroduced through the mention of a conflict between the song’s characters. 

“Tell the truth, love. Is this where you wanted us to live?”

Jamieson, in explaining the meaning behind “Vista,” said that it is written from when she was in the midst, as she puts it, of falling in love. “I think I sensed the danger in my own emotions. It was intense and rapid, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, this song seems to reveal my awareness of losing myself very quickly.

That intensity is written into the song’s later verses, where the sense of tension becomes heightened. “I’m swinging corners—taking on the road at double speed,” she warns. “Get a grip, love, there’s shit I wanna live to see,” she continues, singing what is presumably a response from the other person in the car alongside her. 

And it is impressive how “Vista,” musically, works from a holding pattern of sorts, swirling around this feeling of dread, or unease, churning underneath Jamieson’s evocative language. And there is no resolution, in terms of the dissonance in the song’s arranging, as the song arrives at the end, but also, no resolution for our characters here either, with the song concluding with a question unanswered. 

“Slam the door shut—throwing all the money to the drink,” she exclaims in the final moments while everything is slowing down around her. “Is it too much—looking at the vista from the brink?”

And there are, of course, recurring themes present throughout I Still Want to Share, which is what makes it such a fascinating and stunning album to spend time within. There are also, at least in the song “Highway,” which arrives in the album’s second half, images that are similar to those Jamieson wrote into the narrative of “Vista.” 

There is a gentleness, at first, with “Highway,” in how it begins, with Jamieson’s voice much more prevalent in the mix, and the pensive, deliberate strums of the electric guitar coming in quietly underneath that, giving the song a small amount of rhythm, or structure, to guide her narrative. 

Like “Vista,” there is a kind of uncertainty that runs through “Highway,” or a tension that does simmer, and then eventually boils over as the song gathers in intensity and careens toward an explosive, disorienting conclusion.

The build toward that is methodical in how it is paced, and how more elements are introduced over the course of the song’s four-minute runtime—and even when these other sounds do appear, like the eerie additional vocal track that accompanies Jamieson’s wordless howling in what serves as the chorus, or the low, ominous tones that ripple underneath the surface the further along the narrative goes—they are not fully woven into the fabric of the song, but are used as a means of dramatic punctuation, before receding.

“You turn out the light when the dawn’s taking over,” Jamieson begins at the top of the song. “Stayed up half the night, holding my eyelids open,” she continues, returning to an image similar to one from the lyrics of “Vista,” and like “Vista,” “Highway” begins not in the middle of something already happening, exactly, but it does place us within a very detailed moment in time, again, between two people.

Jamieson explained in her analysis of the song that it was the first song she managed to write after a painful breakup and admits that when she was working on it, she had “no idea” what she was writing about. “I was feeling my way out of the dark. The imagery just seemed to flow, of driving way from home, following a call to escape…there was this mage of running away and away and finding you’ve run in a circle back to your own doorstep.”

There is a vividness to the imagery in “Highway,” and how literate the lyricism is, but there is also this kind of ominous, metaphorical ambiguity that she begins to write from as the song gets underway—it is effective, certainly. And startling. And it creates this creeping sense of unease that is sustained until the final, tumultuous moments.

“I witnessed a crime on the emptying highway,” she confesses. “I don’t have the time to lose any speed. Got two days to drive—all that is mine, in the back, on the seat.”

And it is fascinating, and I think speaks to the intelligence that Jamieson has as an artist, that even in the slower pacing of a song like “Highway,” and the kind of wandering, or slightly unfocused way it unfolds, there is something surprisingly infectious about it—her vocal melody, for even as haunted, and melancholic as it is, does linger with you.

There is a kind of frantic careening into cacophony that does occur, as “Highway” nears its conclusion, with the guitar strumming becoming more intense, and Jamieson’s vocal delivery rising, and really conveying the kind of unease and sorrow found within the lyrics. 

“This night is a mask for the high that you ride when you leave,” she sings, with a soulful inflection, in the moment before the arranging of the song spirals into dissonance. 

“Surely dusk will last til you stop the car,” she howls, just before everything comes to a halt, and there is a starting kind of silence that hangs, giving us, as listeners, so much to consider in the song’s wake. 

*

Welcome, little one. Don’t drink too much just ‘cause

Two years ago, in reading about Sophie Jamieson’s debut full-length Choosing, I saw the phrase “fraught relationship with alcohol,” and that was why I listened.

I think of a telephone conversation with my best friend, near the end of 2023. “Nobody with as many mental health problems as you have should be drinking as much as you are.”

And whenever the refrigerator in the basement shudders—the small, dorm-style, micro-fridge, the bottles resting on top of it gently clatter together. 

There are nine bottles of beer—seasonally specific beer. Idiosyncratic beer for the winter, or winter holidays. The bottles are lined up on the top of this refrigerator, stationed in the corner of the basement. And the beer has been there for well over a year—gathering dust as December turned into January and a new year began. 

And December turned into January again.

Another new year. 

There are nine bottles of beer. I was uncertain what to do with them. I am still uncertain what to do with them.

And I am often in the basement when the refrigerator shudders, and the bottles, briefly, rattle against one another. I am in the basement doing laundry. I am in the basement, laying on the floor, in the early hours of the morning before my spouse is awake, stretching and “focusing on my core,” as a means of treating the chronic pain I have been in for six years from the bulging disc in the middle of my spine.

I am in the basement, sitting at a table with all of the equipment needed to record the podcast I co-host with my best friend. I see her face on the screen of one of my computers—she is in her living room, 30 miles away. And when the refrigerator shudders, and the bottles rattle, the sound, however brief, bleeds onto my microphone and I can often hear it when I am editing what we’ve recorded. 

When the refrigerator shudders, sometimes my best friend, and co-host, can hear it too, through her headphones. It would startle her, and she’d ask what the noise was. 

Two years ago, in reading about Sophie Jamieson’s debut full-length Choosing, I saw the phrase “fraught relationship with alcohol,” and that was why I listened.

There are nine bottles of beer. I was uncertain what to do with them. I am still uncertain what to do with them.

I’m only on side A. I’ve still got the whole long play.

Welcome, little one. Don’t drink too much just ‘cause

I hesitate to say that Choosing was a song cycle, or concept album, but it was a collection of songs that were connected through recurring images and, themes, or ideas—Jamieson’s relationship with alcohol is at the core of it, and within the press materials for the album, it refers to the album’s single, “Sink,” as a “love letter to alcohol amid an increasing dependence upon it.”

Alcohol does not play as central of a role in the storytelling on I Still Want to Share, though there are still moments where it does appear—the line “feed me whiskey at the hotel,” from “Vista” is haunting, and hangs a little heavier, I think, given the subject matter of Jamieson’s first full-length. 

And there is a line within the song that arrives at the album’s halfway point, “Welcome,” that has been lingering since the first time I sat down with it.

“Welcome,” regardless of what it is about, is genuinely interesting just in terms of its arranging—standing out from a bulk of the songs on I Still Want to Share because it is structured around the strums of the acoustic guitar, and the rippling beat of a drum machine, an element which is not used elsewhere on the record, and gives it a fascinating, dreamy texture.

Jamieson described “Welcome” as a “simple love song,” but that it eventually came to mean more to her than that—“subconsciously” realizing she had written a kind of lullaby of belonging to herself. 

Musically, and just in terms of the album’s engineering, there is a more immediate kind of intimacy to “Welcome,” as it begins. Again, Choosing was an album that was intimately recorded and left more or less untouched in terms of additional polishing in the post-production process by intention. And again, there is an intimate nature to the songs on I Still Want to Share, but they are inherently much larger in scope. But here, there is a kind of hush, as the song opens, which magnifies the small details, like the sound of the room, and Jamieson’s fingers gliding up and down the neck of the acoustic guitar.

There is a switch that occurs, though, tonally, in “Welcome,” once the bubbling drum machine comes in, joined by a swooshing effect and a low, ominous rumble. Jamieson is, as she continues to show throughout this record, fascinated with the idea of dissonance, or an edge, to a lot of her music. It never becomes, like, “harsh,” or unlistenable, or inaccessible, but there is just this kind of uneasy feeling that she oscillates into often, and, at times, chooses not to resolve those notes into something a little more harmonious.

The pull into this edge arrives early on “Welcome,” as the song finds its way into a dirge-like rhythm, and in that trudging forward, it is her lyricism here, vivid, poetic, and fragmented, that makes it so compelling and truly haunting.

“My arms go this wide,” she sings, stretching and pulling the syllables of the words out over the gurgling beat underneath her. “You can’t miss me on the sidewalk. I’m an open fire door.”

For as subdued as “Welcome” can be, there are these intense flashes, as the swooshing sound, and a kind of disembodied twinkling, come rushing to the front of the mix before they recede, giving more space for the gravity of Jamieson’s reflections to hang.

“Welcome, little one,” she beckons as the song ends before offering a warning. “Don’t drink too much just ‘cause.”

*

I am remiss to say that an album like I Still Want to Share is “front-loaded” with its best material because the reality is an album such as this is ultimately intended to be consumed as a whole piece of art—that is not to say that you cannot, if you wish, extract a song or two from its context, but it would behoove you, I think, not to do that, and rather experience it from beginning to end.

However, there are moments within the album, and they both happen to be within the first half, that are certainly the most gorgeous, and swooning, in their arranging, and the emotions that they convey. And I think it is because of that, it makes them just a little more accessible than other parts of the album, and certainly allows them to linger with you, or resonate, well after the album has come to an end.

One of those moments is the album’s glacial, sorrowful, sweeping opening track, “Camera,” which, the further along we are pulled into it, the more swelling and enormous it becomes in scope.

“Camera” begins in the familiar way as other songs included within I Still Want to Share begin, with just the strums of Jamieson’s electric guitar, slowly and gradually assembling the chordal patterns that the other elements, when introduced, will fold themselves into. Structurally, “Camera” is a song that ultimately knows exactly what it is doing in terms of creating a stirring sense of theatrically when the additional instrumentation arrives, like the robust string arrangement, an additional, buzzier, and mournful sounding electric guitar, and the precisely tapped out percussion keeping time, and order, underneath the sudden rising and falling momentum the song maintains—understanding when to ascend to surprising, compelling heights, and when to gently and somberly float back down.

“Camera” is one of the more evocative songs on the album in terms of its writing—and given the context of the other songs on the album, one can surmise what it is more than like about, or at least adjacent to, but what is fascinating about how it is written, and how it unravels within the grandeur that surrounds Jamieson's voice, is how poetic and vague the lyrics are, while still being incredible vivid and tangible in what is being described. 

Jamieson takes a breath before beginning, her voice beautiful and haunting. “I broke it into half,” she begins, assured in the statement she’s making. “There in my hand. The camera. Couldn’t get the focus to land—it had to go,” she continues, really holding the notes and allowing the words to coast across the top of her guitar strings. “We can’t all wait here, you know.”

Of the song, Jamieson says she wrote it when her heart was broken and she was “trying to hold together everything that didn’t want to be held.” And you do get that feeling, the more time you spend within the song, because there is a kind of desperation and urgency to it that grows and grows, within the lyrics, and the way she delivers them, which is sharply contrasted against the stunning arranging. 

“I wanted to be able to draw an outline around the pieces,” she explains in her analysis of the song. “Fit them into a frame. Something in me knew that I’d find some peace if I just let things stay blurry, but everything in me wanted some focus.”

The further along Jamieson pulls us into the song, ascending and then plummeting with the swooning arranging that continues to build, her lyrics remain vivid though ambiguous, but also grow in a kind of intensity within the song’s bridge, and its final verse. 

“Widening the shot, like curtains rising,” she describes. “Letting go of all you’ve got to find it.”

“You levitate an inch above the blurring,” Jamieson continues, as “Camera” heads into its final moments. “Drawing out the mark of love and stirring the view,” she sings, before hitting the poignant, resonant final line. 

“I’m not here to look at you.”

The song itself, regardless of where it was placed on the album, is a marvel, and it is a truly remarkable and stunning opening track. Not exactly indicative of the tone, overall, of the album to come, the difficult self-reflection that Jamieson does on “Camera” works as a thesis statement or prologue of sorts for where she is going to take us next.

*

I’m hanging on the weather that surrounds you all damn day.

Something that I, up until a few years ago, had not given much consideration to, and something, certainly, that I struggle to keep in mind now, even though I am well aware of it, is how my crippling depression effects others around me.

Depression makes you insular. Or, at least, in my experiences with it over the last decade, that is what it has done to me. You retreat further inward, often making yourself smaller in a sense. And in that retreating, you are, of course, losing yourself, or parts of yourself, but you also lose sight of what that does to someone else.

Or, rather, what that does to how you interact with someone else. 

For the longest time, I have been convinced that I am not easy to love, because of that. Though there are people in my life who regularly disagree with this.

And there is a part of this, I think, in the absolutely breathtaking, cathartic “I Don’t Know What to Save,” which not only was the first single issued from I Still Want to Share, when it was announced in the fall of 2024, but it is also without a doubt the album’s finest moment—certainly in terms of how cinematic and stirring it is in the arranging, and how accessible it is in terms of structure and melody, but I think more important than that, it is the raw and frantic emotion found in the lyrics, and how Jamieson delivers them with a rising sense of immediacy.

“I Don’t Know What to Save” begins without warning, and in its earliest moments, it does operate from a kind of hush, though there is this feeling of tension present within even its quietest moments. 

Opening with Jamieson’s voice barely rising above a whisper, she sings over the top of the strum and slight chug of her electric guitar, before the other elements of the song all come tumbling in and find their place, like the secondary guitar melody, noodled mournfully in between stanzas as a means of punctuating the space and silence, or the eventual arrival or the deliberately tapped out percussion, building up to the moment that all the elements do really converge, the low, singular rumbling of the bass notes, or the solemn, beautiful bowing of the cello, which is then joined by additional string instrumentation to create a gorgeous arrangement that is complimentary to everything else occurring within the song’s environment.

If “Camera” serves as the thesis, or prologue to the album, I would say that “I Don’t Know What to Save” is not, like, the “key” to understanding the rest of the songs on I Still Wish to Share, but it is certainly a place where the conceit of this collection of songs reveals itself more—specifically the turmoil that comes from the notion of having to let go, and all the weight that carries.

“I don’t wanna push you away,” Jamieson warns within the first second the song begins. “But distance speaks in volumes and I’m only just okay,” she continues before the urgency within her voice begins to take over and asks, “Build me something better.”

And that is a through line that she pulls on as “I Don’t Know” continues to grow and swoon. The idea of asking for more of someone, in the hopes that they will meet you where you are, or that they can give you what you want from them. It isn’t easy, of course. To see where you are failing—someone calling attention to your shortcomings is humbling, and often uncomfortable, and potentially makes things worse before they could possibly get better.

“I don’t wanna tell you that we’re not the same,” Jamieson continues. “But I’m hanging on the weather that surrounds you all damn day. Picking up whatever you make and glue it together when it breaks—will you build me something better, babe?”

The tapping of the cymbal, keeping the rhythm moving forward, rolls into a precise-sounding snare hit right on cue to emphasize the beginning of the second verse. “I broke you a little yesterday,” Jamieson confesses. “You think we’re on a level where something here is safe. Well, I’ll tell you something better, babe,” she continues. “I’m out here on a different wave, and when my head goes under, I still break,” she exclaims, more urgency growing in her voice, before arriving at the titular phrase.

“I don’t know what to leave or what to save.”

The thing, musically, about “I Don’t Know” is the admirable restraint it manages to maintain—even in how it does gradually build and becomes more robust in terms of the elements included, and the overall swooning theatrically it reaches once it arrives at its second half, the song is never at risk of getting way from Jamieson, and in terms of pacing, even in its most intense moments, it remains incredibly even.

In how it unravels, “I Don’t Know” does not follow a traditional verse/chorus/verse pattern, but rather, Jamieson sings two verses, before arriving at what serves as an extended chorus, which repeats until the end—with each time she sings through them, a kind of desperate, manic energy growing in intensity.

“The air here’s thinner than ice,” she bellows. “I have to touch everything twice. But it’s there when I do—and I can even put my hands through you.”

It is a haunting final image, and meditation, really, that Jamieson leaves us with as the song concludes, and the instrumentation reaches a dramatic height—one of needing, and seeking assurance in a time, or space, of tumult, but then the understanding, however difficult, of having to let go of something. Or, in this case, really letting go of someone as they, perhaps, were already fading.

And that is something I think about. Not often. Not as often as I once did. But it is something that I do find myself occasionally giving consideration to.

The idea of fading away. 

Feeling like we are slowly fading away. Noticing the distance that begins to form.

I think about the weather that surrounds me, and how those that I am closest to, or care for the most, may hang on it.

For the longest time, I have been convinced that I am not easy to love, because of that. The way that living with depression can make you insular—you retreat further inward, making yourself smaller. Perhaps appearing unapproachable. Perhaps harder, or more difficult to be around. 

Impossible to manage emotionally. 

Which is why, I think, outside of how beautiful, and sorrowful, and well-assembled and executed a song like “I Don’t Know What to Save” is, outside of its lyricism, it is the unflattering portrait of the off-stage antagonist that Jamieson paints that makes it one of the more poignant moments on the record, because when she sings, with a heavy, desperate gravity in her voice, “Picking up whatever you make and glue it together when it breaks—will you build me something better, babe?,” all that I am able to think about is the ways in which I have let others down, or the ways in which I have tried, and tried, and yet continue to fail, or fall short. 

*

I Still Want to Share ends with the album’s longest song, “Time Pulls You Over Backwards,” which, within the structure of the album, serves as a sort of afterward, if you look at it, and “Camera,” as bookends to the narrative that Jamieson has woven throughout this collection of songs.

And, for an album that certainly is as emotionally charged as I Still Want to Share is, from top to bottom, this final moment for the record may be the most outward in terms of the emotion, or weight, that it carries—but also how it is carried. Jamieson’s electric guitar strings glisten, yes, and there are these faint chimes that twinkle and underscore the melody in the song’s chorus that offset the heaviness of the song, but it is really the pacing of the song, and a kind of subtle, natural rise and fall, and not buckling, exactly, at times, but there are these moments where Jamieson takes just the smallest breath, and the song pauses before she begins again. 

And it is the pause, I think that is important.

“Time Pulls You Over Backwards” is a reflection on a lot of what Jamieson has detailed in the songs that preceded it within the album’s run, but that reflection is steeped in sorrow and a tangible regret.

The question that Jamieson ruminates on throughout is, “Do I wish I never loved you.” 

“Do I wish I never loved you,” she begins, as the very first line in the song. “Never opened up the door to the waterfall of something that’s never gonna fit where it was stored.”

“Do I wish I never loved you—never pulled the barb in deep,” she continues, later on. “Buried in the chest where it seemed to fit best, and I could rock us both to sleep.” 

The song was written, months after her breakup, from a place of real resentment. “I was exploring the what-ifs,” she explained. “And trying for the first time to look at what opening up, and making myself vulnerable, had created anew in me. I realized that my continual efforts to love through pain had not only hurt me but stretched me—I had touched depths of myself I had not yet seen.”

And though in her analysis of the song, and the process she went through in writing it, she came to the understanding that she should never regret love, regardless of how difficult it might have ultimately been in the end. But the song itself ends without that kind of resolution for her.

“Do I wish I never loved you—that I never slowed you down,” she asks, near the end. “Do I wish I had undone you the way you have me now?”

And you can hear it start, when Jamieson begins these lines, specifically. There is something in her voice—it isn’t playing her hand, exactly, but she is revealing, in tone, and in the slightest quiver, and the notes that she chooses to hold, just how personally impactful this song is, or this moment in the song is. You can hear it, in the way she extends the word “now,” and how her voice strains in a terribly mournful, honest way as she does it.

You can hear it in how long, and deliberate the silence is, before she begins the final few lines of the song. There is a hesitation. And a real sadness. As she mournfully pushes her voice through until the last word mingles in dissonance with the notes played on her guitar. 

“Time pulls you over backwards,” she shudders. “Deep beneath your age. Bends you at bloody angle every time you play.”

*

I saw the phrase “fraught relationship with alcohol,” and that was why I listened.

Because there does, of course, reach a point when it becomes fraught or has been fraught for longer than you really wished to admit to anyone, including yourself.

Because I can still remember the tone in my best friend’s voice during a telephone conversation where, near the end of 2023, she told me, “Nobody with as many mental health problems as you have should be drinking as much as you are.”

I am often connecting, or making connections, between music and time. Or music and life. Perhaps, this is something you do as well. It is, often, at least for me, and how I listen, and how I think about music, something that is unavoidable. 

When I return to an album after it has arrived into the world, and after I’ve first listened to it, I will think about where I was when it came into my life. The year itself, and all the weight a year can hold. The time of year. And more than where I was, when I return to an album, I often find myself ruminating on who I was, and how much I may have changed, for better or worse, within the interim.

I think about how long things may have been fraught for. 

I think about how long things had been fraught for whenever the refrigerator in the basement shutters. The small, dorm-style, micro-fridge. And the nine bottles of seasonally specific beer that are resting on top of it that gently clatter together in this moment. 

The bottles, left to gather dust as December turned into January and a new year began. 

And then December turned into January once again. Another new year.

I stopped drinking alcohol on December 30th, 2023. 

I stopped because I felt I had to. Because it was no longer serving me. Maybe it had never been serving me, really. Becoming a crutch that I was putting more and more weight on. Two or three drinks in the evening, every evening. Not even to feel a “buzz.” Just an attempt to feel something when I, more often than not, felt nothing. Becoming a crutch I was putting more and more weight on. Standing in the kitchen, preparing dinner, before my spouse arrives home. My eyes looking at the clock on the stovetop, counting down the minutes until it reached 5 p.m. The time I justified to myself that it was okay to reach my hand into the small, dorm-style, micro-fridge and then reach my hand for a bottle opener. 

I think about how long things had been fraught for. 

I am often connecting, or making connections, between music and time. Or music and life.

When I return to an album after it has arrived into the world, and after I’ve first listened to it, I will think about where I was when it came into my life. The year itself, and all the weight a year can hold. The time of year. And more than where I was, when I return to an album, I often find myself ruminating on who I was, and how much I may have changed, for better or worse, within the interim.

And there, of course, are a number of things that, in the years that have elapsed, I think about when I give consideration to Sophie Jamieson’s debut, Choosing. I think about the final optimistic line, certainly, but I also thought regularly about the frantic, growing intensity of the way she sang the titular word in the song “Empties.” 

I think about how long things had been fraught for.

“No, baby,” she sings. “You’d better not leave me standing in my empties.”

And maybe that is why for more than a year, and for more than a year, now, of sobriety, there are still nine bottles of beer, long since past their “best by” dates, that gently rattle together when the small, dorm-style, micro-fridge they are resting on top of shudders when its cooling cycle is complete. A reminder. Maybe. 

Of no longer being served.

A reminder of why I felt like I needed to stop.

Last year was a long year. And at times, extraordinary in how unforgiving it was, personally. 

I think, though, of how long things had been fraught for. And I think of how at the end of Choosing, on the very last song, “Long Play,” Sophie Jamieson assures. “You’re only on side A. You’ve still got the whole long play to twist.”

I Still Want to Share is still about a fraught relationship. Though, this time, two years removed, it is not about Jamieson’s fraught relationship with alcohol. But rather about interpersonal relationships and, ultimately, her relationship with herself. It is a beautiful, evocative, and haunting meditation—gorgeous in the juxtaposition of the lush arrangements, and the penchant for skeletal instrumentation that she still favors, and extraordinary in how thoughtful and literate its writing is. 

In writing about Choosing, two years ago, during a bleak and long winter, I referred to it, or at least its creation, as a labor of love for Sophie Jamieson—she was honest about how much effort, emotional and otherwise, went into making the album happen. I Still Want to Share, too, is a labor of love—or, at least, there is still labor involved. Jamieson, still very honest in what she reveals on social media, shared thoughts about the idea of promotion and the “album cycle” and what that can do, around the time of the album’s release. 

“The list of things that an artist is supposed to do now, at bare minimum, to please the algorithm machine has finally defeated me,” she confessed, before adding. “What I make does not fit into this machine, and the more I try to squeeze it in, the more I lose, and the less it gives back.”

“In my work, I am myself, and when I show up here, I just want to be myself. I do not want to suck you into the cesspit any more than you already are,” she continued. “I want to offer you an extended hand, some shared ground, or an exchange of breath. I want to offer you a world that is both real and imagined, that takes time, quiet and intention to step into. I want you to have agency as to whether you choose to step in or not.”

Music, sometimes, asks a lot of us, as listeners. To not passively engage with it. To open ourselves up more to it. I Still Want to Share is like that. It is not a passive album. Not a passive listen. It is immersive in the world that it creates and pulls us into, and as it ends, as she did before, two years ago, on Choosing, Sophie Jamieson has created the kind of album that will linger with you long after her final, held, dissonant note fades into silence. 

I Still Want to Share is available now via Bella Union.