Jessie Ware Explains Why This Smoldering Alicia Keys Ballad Is Her Personal Anthem
Listening to Jessie Ware’s new album What’s Your Pleasure? feels like entering a decadent, multilevel nightclub where the British singer is the sparkling star attraction in every room. Over video chat, however, she looks more like she’s reigning over a slumber party than an opulent dancefloor.
Peering through cat-eye glasses and draped in a silk robe, Ware is cheerful and a little bleary as she chats from a couch in her sunlit living room. It’s 7 in the evening at her apartment in London, where Ware has been keeping busy in quarantine, looking after her two kids, recording new episodes of her popular food podcast Table Manners with her mom, and filming bedroom performances for TV shows in which her head is surrounded by a backdrop of twinkling LED lights. It’s all led to more than a little bit of stress. “I had a twitch in my eye for about eight days,” she says.
Amid the day-to-day whirlwind, Ware has found some solace in music, and one song in particular: Alicia Keys’ “Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart.” Taken from Keys’ 2009 album The Element of Freedom, the track is a gut-punch ballad with a bridge that sounds like it was ripped from Purple Rain. The song may not have topped the charts, but it remains one of the R&B superstar’s most indelible singles, especially for a longtime fan like Ware.
Pitchfork: Why is this song your personal anthem?
Jessie Ware: Something about songwriting and music and artistry clicked when I heard it. There’s a timelessness to it. I hate karaoke with a passion, but I feel like this would be my karaoke song. You have to wail when you’re doing it. The euphoria of that chorus just hits you.
It’s a real performance moment. It can be played at any time, and I’ll stop and kind of fist pump with it—which is not my most beautiful dancing. It’s also got one of the best middle eights ever. There’s so much suspense in the verse holding that high note—a note that worked for me on “Champagne Kisses.” I’ve always respected Alicia, but that felt like the most exciting example of her using this husky voice, which is insanely sexy. It felt like dynamite. There’s just an ease with her, and I feel like I’m finding my stride with that ease in the artist I am.
And [producer] Jeff Bhasker is a genius. This song made me want to work with him. We have mutual friends, so I got a chance to write with him [after 2012’s Devotion], but I really cringe at the thought now. Jeff is phenomenal, but I did not come match ready because I was slightly in awe of this brilliant person. I didn’t speak! I was so angry at myself. I feel like I need to rectify how fucking nervous I was in the studio.
Have you ever met Alicia Keys?
No, but I’ve heard really great things about her. I went to see her at Royal Albert Hall in 2011. It was just her playing the piano, and she conducted such an impressive performance. She’s hugely successful, don’t get me wrong, but just seeing her with a piano? There’s such power in that. There’s something sophisticated and confident about her artistry that I’ve been wanting to achieve. I’ve felt so petrified for the majority of my career but now I’m finally settling in. Hopefully I have an ounce of Alicia’s confidence in me.
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
