‘Did you give me a rooibos?” splutters Jessie Ware, looking incredulously down at the mug of tea handed to her by Sam, her then-fiance, now husband. “Fucking hell, you did. Control freak. That’s going to be reported in the Guardian: ‘Jessie Ware, domestic prisoner’.” She’s joking, but when we meet in her flat in south London to chat over caffeine-free tea, her usually easy-going demeanour is tinged with an undercurrent of mania. It’s not surprising her nearest and dearest are trying to keep her away from any stimulants; a later misunderstanding about a caramel wafer leads to an outburst worthy of an East End gangster. But it’s no wonder she’s on edge: as well as trying to organise her impending wedding in Greece (her mum calls during our interview with news on the venue: “I bet that’s my mum … It’s my fucking mum! Sam, get it!”), there’s also the matter of her forthcoming second album, Tough Love, a mix of refined soul and crystalline pop.
This juxtaposition between the artist (gregarious, deliciously foul-mouthed, prone to a good gossip) and the art (delicate, melancholic, sophisticated) is what makes Ware interesting. Cocooned in a loving relationship and on the cusp of marriage, she seems blissfully happy, yet Tough Love is littered with broken relationships. “I’m in a really happy stage of my life, but it doesn’t mean I can’t write about things that affect me or that I relate to from the past,” she says. “Songwriting is about storytelling.”
Her new single, the weepy, gospel-tinged Say You Love, for example, was apparently not written with anyone in mind, but subconsciously dealt with the two years when she and Sam had split up. This lyrical focus on the bad times might have something to do with the fact that the mushy love songs she’s written specifically for him tend to be the ones he dislikes. “He’s never a fan of the ones I’ve written about him,” she laughs, legs tucked up beneath her chin. “I’m like: ‘Babe, I’ve written you this song.’ Nothing. One new song, You & I (Forever), is me celebrating the memory of the fact that he’s proposed to me and that we’ll be together for ever.” She smiles, but then, and this is a very Jessie Ware thing to do, quickly adds: “I hope it doesn’t come across as saccharine.”
It’s telling that the creation of both Tough Love and her Mercury-nominated debut, Devotion, were marked by Ware’s surprising lack of self-confidence. An early session for Devotion was curtailed after she burst into tears during an improvised singsong around the piano, while Tough Love featured a similar episode with a member of pop-songwriting royalty she asks me not to name. “The guy asked me to sit in the middle of the room while he played the piano and he told me to just sing and I was like, ‘I can’t do that,’ and he said: ‘No, just sing and I’ll play.’ I went in the other room and it reminded me of when I started writing the first album. I got a lump in my throat and was like: ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry.’ I hate it. It felt like I was auditioning and soon as I’m auditioning it gets scary.”
This lack of confidence is surprising, I tell her, not least because her debut album peaked in the top five (“It was a slow week, I think,” she counters) and Tough Love’s featherlight title track and first single became her first UK top 40 single earlier this year. Again, her answer is self-deprecating: “I mean, we say ‘top 40’ because 34 doesn’t sound so good,” she cackles, dunking a biscuit. “But no, it tells me my fans are really backing me. I felt very apologetic at the beginning. I felt like I had to earn this relationship and I’m flabbergasted that that was the song that got me into the top 40, but I’m not complaining.”
In a pop world full of cloying ambition and singers swinging around naked on demolition equipment to get people’s attention, the sense that Ware herself can’t quite believe it’s all really happening is heartwarming. Ask her if she’s ambitious enough to try to conquer the US, like fellow heart-on-their-sleeve crooners Sam Smith and Adele, and she’ll say, that while it would be nice, she’s keen to get the people in the UK to like her first. “As long as I can carry on touring and having a career, then I’m fine,” she says. During a recent festival appearance in Finland, a last-minute change in lineup meant she was bumped up the bill. Again, the response isn’t exactly what you’d imagine from the likes of Jessie J. “I said: ‘I shouldn’t be on the main stage because no one’s going to be there,’ and my sound guy was just like: ‘Jessie, shut up, just fucking enjoy it,’ and then I did enjoy it.” While it’s great to have big brash pop stars who are keen to kick down every proverbial door to get where they need to be, Ware feels like a throwback to the likes of Sade or Annie Lennox, creators of classic, universal pop songs about love and heartbreak, delivered with genuine warmth.
Nearly 30, and with a debut album released when she was 27 – practically geriatric in pop terms – her route to stardom feels almost accidental. The daughter of a news reporter, she studied to become a journalist, briefly working as a sportswriter at the Daily Mirror and then at the Jewish Chronicle, before realising that her love of being nosy couldn’t hide the fact that, as she puts it, she “wasn’t very good at writing”. Asked by her old schoolfriend Jack Peñate to sing backing vocals for him on tour, she met the artist and producer SBTRKT, who asked her to sing on the appropriately titled Nervous. That, in turn, started a working relationship with Red Bull Studios, which offered her a more relaxed environment in which to work on Devotion. “Basically, Red Bull Studios asked me to do Nervous at their Notting Hill carnival party and after that I recorded [debut single] Strangest Feeling at their studio. I still find the idea of writing and recording songs fucking petrifying. It got a bit easier the second time round, but at their studio it’s not intimidating. It’s the most warm and inviting environment.”
With half of Tough Love recorded at Red Bull Studios’ London basement, and partly with their current in-house producer Julio Bashmore, Ware recently embarked on a remix project that involved visiting five of their studios across the world and getting five different producers – ranging from garage newcomer Preditah to Russian DJ Nina Kraviz – to remix the multilayered Keep On Lying. “I just knew [Keep On Lying] would exist on the record as an album track but I wanted it to have a bit more of a spotlight on it,” she explains. “Bashmore and I worked on it at their studios. He’s the producer in residence there for a year and so I think it was a nice way of being able to thank them.”
Expressing gratitude towards an offshoot of a multinational drinks company, albeit a not-for-profit one, might come across as disingenuous. But after spending time with Ware both in the London studio and in Amsterdam for the Kraviz session, it’s obvious she doesn’t do anything she’s not comfortable with (she once turned down a remix from a diminutive pop superstar on the basis that it was rubbish), and that the people she works and surrounds herself with on a daily basis need to be friends first, collaborators second. So while that early recording session for Tough Love may have been intimidating, the finished album features an impressive roster of collaborators – including Dev Hynes, Ed Sheeran, Miguel and production duo BenZel, AKA Two Inch Punch and Benny Blanco – who have since become close friends. In fact, such was Ware’s desire to make her two-day studio session with Miguel as relaxed as possible, she got so drunk celebrating the first day that she could barely muster the energy for the second. “I had the worst hangover,” she sighs, resting her head in her hands as if the memory alone has drained all the blood from her body. “I thought I was dying. Vomiting everywhere. Go to the second session and Miguel’s there and he’s fresh and I’m just pale with mascara all over my face. I was just a mess.”
The incongruity of having someone like Blanco – who has produced global pop hits for the likes of Rihanna, Maroon 5 and Kesha – working with a singer formerly prone to double-tracking her vocals in order to bury herself in the mix isn’t lost on Ware. “I joked with Benny and told him: ‘This is going to be your least successful project ever. It has to be,’” she says. “I’ve developed a whole new group of friends that you would put in the music bracket, but they are very dear to me. Benny and Ben, who are BenZel, these are people I trust and who I call for advice. And yes, one of them happens to be a massive hitmaker, but I have to feel like there’s a magic and trust with the people I work with.”
It was through Blanco – whom she met in New York via mutual friends – that she got to work with Sheeran on the acoustic-led and romcom-ready epic Say You Love Me. It is, you feel, her first shot at a proper hit, a suggestion that causes her eyebrows to shoot up to meet her hairline. “I think it’s a classic, really well-written song,” she mumbles sheepishly. “It shows another edge to my voice. Working with artists like Miguel and Ed pushed me vocally without them really knowing it. They’re so talented and technically gifted so they’d sing something and I’d be like, ‘Yeah, that sounds wicked,’ and then I’d try it and be like, ‘Oh, I’m going to have to practise that.’ For this album, I’ve definitely found a confidence with using my voice. I think I was scared and hiding my vocal on the first one and I didn’t want too much of an identity – I wanted it to just be smooth.”
As with Devotion, Tough Love is an album the flits effortlessly between Radio 2-friendly ballads, such as the string-drenched Pieces, to the textured, Miguel-assisted Kind of … Sometimes … Maybe and the deliriously loved-up Champagne Kisses (which, she’s keen to point out, isn’t about “expensive blowies”). It’s a reflection of her ability to effortlessly straddle that previously untouched terrain between Best New Music write-ups on Pitchfork on the one hand and a guest appearances on The X Factor in Poland on the other (“I’m massive in Poland, I get like four bodyguards there,” she laughs).
“I fucking loved doing The X Factor,” she says unapologetically, when I suggest other artists might see it as bad for the brand. “For me, that was fucking brilliant. I think that’s cool. I’m very true to myself and I love pop music. So while I want it to sound relatively cool, I’m not going to deny a massive hook.”
• The single Say You Love Me is out on 29 September, followed by the album Tough Love on 13 October, both on PMR/Island
New soul traders – three more slinky UK acts
Rosie Lowe
A textured tapestry of burbling electronics and scattershot drum beats, London-based Rosie Lowe’s fragile 2013 EP Right Thing – co-produced by Ware collaborator Dave Okumu – announced an intriguing new talent unafraid to manipulate genre barriers. Producer Paul Epworth was so impressed he signed her to his label Wolf Tone and is working on her debut album, due in early 2015. More melancholic perhaps than Ware’s brand of nu soul, Lowe’s songs tend to draw on her varied musical background – she sang in jazz bands from the age of 13 – to create moments of unnerving beauty.
Kwabs
Ghanaian-born, London-based Kwabena Sarkodee Adjepong, AKA Kwabs, has also worked with Dave Okumu on the undulating soul of Spirit Fade, a track taken from his debut EP, Wrong or Right. It’s the title track – produced by the enigmatic Sohn, who’s also worked with nu-soul practitioners Banks and Rhye – that fully showcases Kwabs’ ability to melt his big soulful voice into the fidgety, electronic textures summoned by his producers. While that early EP overflowed with hooky melodies, its slightly inward-looking standpoint has been exploded on new single Walk, a string-drenched stomper aimed directly at radio playlists.
Billie Black
With influences including a host of jazz greats (she studied at the Guildhall School of Music) to sadface electronic singer James Blake and downcast R&B crooner Sampha, 19-year-old Billie Black makes the kind of breathy, modern soul that sounds simultaneously welcoming and strangely unnerving. I Don’t Need Another Lover, for example, pulls off that Jessie Ware-esque trick of encasing a fairly straightforward love song in a constantly shifting, electronic-tinged setting, while I’ve Waited For You sounds like finger tips tapping skin. A recent collaboration with 18-year-old producer Mura Masa on This Simple Pleasure also showcases how versatile her voice is – its featherlight tones gliding over more vibrant production.
