Photo: Tatjana Rüegsegger

Track-By-Track: Sophie Jamieson guides us through the consequences of affection on I still want to share

The latest album from Sophie Jamieson finds the London songwriter sitting at the crosswords of affection and heartache, finding herself wandering through the turbulence of anxiety and the desire to belong. I still want to share approaches these subjects through a more varied sonic palette than her 2022 debut album, Choosing. Where that album focused on the examination of self-destructive tendencies, her new one explores the consequences of affection is way that feels uniquely suited to her talents. Even when dealing with weightier thematic pursuits, the album maintains a playful and exploratory sense of creative expression. Complex string arrangements vie for your attention against rumbling bass lines and rows of cascading guitars — the album is a profound and inclusive statement on various emotional architectures. 

The infrastructure of love is broken down and dismantled, revealing the complicated depths of its intentions. And it’s here that the record stands apart from its peers; it doesn’t cling to outdated ideas of romance and sentiment. It posits that love is a multi-layered concept with room for countless experiences and interpretations. Pain and joy and doubt all gnaw at the core of these overwhelming sensations, offering drastically different perspectives on the consequences and origins of devotion. To that end, Jamieson has offered to guide us through these layers, providing a play-by-play of each track in her own words, setting the stage for a radiant illumination of emotional analysis. Follow along at home as she breaks down each song and offers insight into the creation of these sonic gravitational wells.


  1. “Camera”

“I wrote this song when my heart was broken and I was trying to hold everything when it didn’t want to be held. I wanted to be able to draw an outline around the pieces, 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 to find some focus. This song is the yearning, wrenching of trying to define a love that was less simple, more layered and less graspable than I could accept.”


  1. “Vista”

“Written in the midst of falling in love, I think I sensed the danger in my own emotions. It was intense and rapid, and though I didn’t realise it at the time, this song seems to reveal my awareness of losing myself very quickly. I felt like a child, in good and bad ways. Everything felt electrified, but also lonely. I found myself painting this picture of a long car drive along cliffs under empty skies, constantly ruining everything, always asking for too much.”


  1. “I don’t know what to save”

“This song was some kind of running break for freedom. I was carrying the weight of my attachment to a person and all the pain entangled with them, but here came an out-reaching, a burst of energy and glimmer of hope. It was an enormous push towards letting go. The unbearable pain of detaching felt like entering some kind of eerie, unknown space that turned out, upon arriving, to be not only totally survivable but like pure, fresh air.”


  1. “Baby”

“I wrote this as a way of trying to understand the process of songwriting, feeling songs growing within and sometimes finding it unbearable. It made me wonder how my mother might have felt when I was growing inside her. That perhaps it was a similar contradiction of struggling to hold on and face the overwhelm that can come with creating something, and struggling to let go of it. It ended up being a meditation on motherhood of various kinds, and how excruciating it can be both to love and release the things we make that have lives of their own.”


  1. “Welcome”

“This was written as a simple love song, but over time I’ve come to understand that I subconsciously wrote some kind of lullaby of belonging to myself. I thought I was coming home to somebody, that their arms were wide open and that I was finally arriving where I’d always wanted to be. I now find this song an eerie echo of hope that goes round in circles, like one of those tiny music boxes. The belonging is constantly elusive, and the small child wanders round blindly in a loop looking for something that feels like home.”


  1. “Highway”

“When I wrote this, I had no idea what I was writing about. It was the first song I managed to get out after a very painful breakup. I guess I was feeling my way out of the dark somehow. The imagery just seemed to flow, of driving away from home, following a call to escape… there was this image of running away and away and finding you’ve run in a circle all the way back to your own doorstep. This song outlines a theme I want this album to convey – that loving and losing, attaching and detaching is a circular, cyclical process that starts and ends with the self, that it’s a repetitive journey within the self, that can never be fully understood or explained.”


  1. “I still want to share”

“This is the oldest song on the album, and the crux of it, I think. In some way it’s just a song about being an only child, and observing family dynamics. I think it’s also about the pain of being loved when that love sometimes feels like control and rejection, and longing to love beyond the family parameters without understanding how to break free of them. It’s taken me a few years to realise that the words “I still want to share” are a child’s words, about wanting to open, love and play, simply, without competition, fear or anxiety.” 


  1. “How do you want to be loved?”

“I wrote this song after a particularly upsetting fight with a close family member. I wanted to write a song that would help me forgive and understand them – 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. It kept bubbling through my attempts to embrace their humanity and complexity. In the end, the song seemed to become a battle between the wounded children in both of us. Their voice and pain came through somehow in a way that broke my heart. The song had to hold the very depths of my hurt, and the depths of theirs all in one.”


  1. “Your love is a mirror”

“I was in a loving, healthy, healing relationship that I didn’t want to be in any more. Admitting why, to myself, was very difficult. On one hand, I felt that I had grown out of this particular dynamic and that all I needed in my life was already within my reach. On the other, my relationship was at the stage where I had to really face myself in order to do the essential work. I guess I just couldn’t bear to be loved like this, because it meant I had to look at what was being loved, and I couldn’t.”


  1. “I’d take you”

“After breaking up with someone, I started to love them all over again, able to see what I couldn’t see up close, able to appreciate the things about them that I struggled with within the relationship. The limits of my own love also became tangible to me. I began to realise how much I do not yet understand about the way I love other people, as my own loving feels like a mystery that I’m constantly trying to pin down and control. It’s complex and unreliable, but I desperately want it to be simple and pure.”


  1. “Time pulls you over backwards”

“In the months following a breakup, I started to resent the fact that I’d ever loved this person. As I wrote this song I was exploring the what-ifs, and trying, for the first time, to look at what opening up and making myself vulnerable, had created anew in me. I realised that my continual efforts to love through pain had not only hurt me but stretched me, that I had touched depths of myself I had not yet seen. I realised that no matter how elusive all kinds of love would always feel, however much it came and went and cut deep, that it would always deepen me, and that I should never, ever regret it.” 


I still want to share is out now via Bella Union. Purchase your copy here. Follow her on Facebook, X, and Instagram.