This is a review of the album Bittersweet, by Jamie Paige. It is one the greatest albums of music I have ever heard. Here is its art:
I will link to some songs over the course of the review. I encourage you to listen!
Prologue
Like all good album reviews, this one begins with a prologue. That prologue is about Jamie Paige’s album before Bittersweet, entitled Autumn Every Day.
Autumn Every Day is an album with extreme swagger, from an (at that time) fairly niche artist. Today, of course, we have all heard of Jamie Paige.1
What do I mean by extreme swagger? Well, let’s sample some lyrics. From this love song, the album’s closer:
and i guess that there’s a reason that you’d stick around so long
i don’t think it’s a coincidence i’ve wrote so many songs
and even if i’m kinda foolish or a bit too insecure
i know i’ll always be your special baby girl
Bolding is mine. Jamie Paige is feeling herself, exploding from her chrysalis and dazzling the crowd. And in what is perhaps the clearest expression of BDE I have ever seen in music, later in the same track:
and your help and your support are why i’m standing here today
so if it means i’ll make you happy i will sing my heart away
god i love you i adore you you’re the light inside my life
and i hope someday that i’ll make you my-
(no like, li- i’ll, like write you a song or something)
The parenthetical is less heavily produced/autotuned than the rest, the musician stepping out of the song before, carried away, the rhyme scheme makes her propose marriage. It is extremely funny.
While I’m on the topic of Autotune, Autumn Every Day also has a delightful petulance. Like, from a track called Too Much Autotune:
i read an argument the other day
they say that pop musicians cheat to sound okay
& blame the downfall of humanity on Cher and Antares
“it’s dishonest and fake, so maybe learn to fucking sing”
and later:
but I guess that i will never be that cool
so i’ll sing and dance and paint myself the fool
and i’ll be fake so I can be more true
and i’ll keep on using too much autotune
(In point of fact, Jamie Paige does not use too much autotune. One of the glories of her sound is that she threads together different machine voices with her own voice under differing degrees of modulation, plus liberal use of repeating motifs and samples, enabling seamless dialogue and multi-layered messages. But I digress.)
This is the album of someone who cannot be stopped, perhaps cannot be reasoned with. Someone who will produce music, brash and punchy, until the sun burns out. She’s in love, she’s feeling herself, and it’s not a coincidence she’s wrote so many songs.
Autumn Every Day released in 2017. Then, for four years, there was silence.
Bittersweet
Autumn Every Day is a beautiful idea. But winter comes. And the intervening years before Jamie Paige’s next album, if we are to take her at her word, were a bleak winter.
After the surging swagger of Autumn Every Day,2 here are the opening lyrics from Bittersweet’s title track:
oh it’s another day over
and i’m left wondering what for
i sat and stared at a paper
and tried so hard to ignore
the thoughts all swirling inside me
that say i’m broken, a bore
i lead it on with a paper
a silent, desolate score
A silent, desolate score! Our girl has been staring into the fucking abyss. Nor does she let up; later in the same track:
my coffee bean dream, so bittersweet
(i want to make a mistake with you)
a polyseme scream, such a stupid thing
(so many things i should say to you)
cause oh my god i love you
i can’t take anymore
but if i’m not creating
what the fuck am i for?
i burst at the seams, you’re so bittersweet
(and all i want is to stay with you)
it wasn’t always like this
i’m just resigned to the pain
but does the fight define us
or does it waste us away?
i am much more than the sum of my work
and even without you there’s so much i am worth
but i know there’s still joy to be found in a song
We’ve gone from a love song where the Work is taken for granted, where music is exuding from this girl’s pores, where she’s invincibly faking out marriage proposals and letting her flag fly on the high seas, to…
Well, to a love song to the Work. A brutal, honest, heart-rending song about how it doesn’t last forever, and yet you can’t give up.
Asemic Speech
Asemic text is gibberish that looks like writing, but doesn’t convey any clear meaning. For example, from Wikipedia:
One standout track on Bittersweet is called Asemic Speech. It begins with a fakeout start to the song, where Jamie Paige messes up and has to start over, and explores the theme of when communication just feels fucking impossible:
i love you, adore you
i hope that doesn’t bore you
i want you, i need you
oh god i want to speak but- but- b- bleh
but it’s so hard to say the things that i’m thinking
like steel in water i’m sinking
(too many to say)
i babble in wordless form
getting lost in the feeling
when i see you beaming
the things around me lose meaning
(asemic and grey)
and jupiter’s endless storm
just a stain on the ceiling
We have come a long way from Autumn Every Day! Autumn Every Day was full of heartfelt tracks that throbbed with a kind of intra-narrative confidence, a person embedded in strange relationships and utterly confident in her frames. In Bittersweet, the frames have fallen away, all that is solid has melted into air, and the love remains, bursting suddenly out of a four year silence, confident in its epic, vast uncertainty.
Coda
I think about these albums all the time. They’re both great. But what keeps me coming back, what makes me tear up when I really sit with it, is that with my hair falling out and my family relationships more complicated and my wife and I struggling sometimes to have basic conversations around the reality of our beautiful baby and my work beginning only slightly to be pulled toward a yawning black hole that seems poised to eat at minimum my industry and at maximum the entire literal galaxy and, and, and…
And I remember being in my 20s. And being so sure of how I saw things, so confident, so willing to drag anyone along who wanted a wild ride into my wake…
I take comfort in the simple fact that as art, as music:
Bittersweet is fucking better.
In lieu of my ordinary call to subscribe - though by all means, please do - I will enjoin you one last time: listen to these albums
While not a household name, she has blown up for real in recent years, including touring with Hatsune Miku, which is, amazingly, possible to do.
Which also, by the way, contains this extremely silly banger from the perspective of a knight swearing fealty to a princess.