London-based songwriter Sophie Jamieson has released “How do you want to be loved?,” the latest single from her highly anticipated second album I still want to share due out January 17, 2025 via Bella Union. The gut-wrenching song explores the relatable struggle to come to forgiveness when faced with pain within deep-rooted familial love and comes alongside a breathtaking video. Sophie shares, “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. This was almost too much to contain.”
Watch / Share: “How do you want to be loved?” video
Earning acclaim spanning The Needle Drop, BrooklynVegan, Guitar Girl Magazine, Northern Transmissions, The Line Of Best Fit and more, the album was co-produced in London by Sophie Jamieson with the Grammy Award-winning Guy Massey (Spiritualized, Manic Street Preachers, The Beatles’ back-catalogue remastering). The new collection is a deeply personal reflection on the cyclical nature of loving and losing, the anxiety we cannot keep out of our relationships, and the perpetual longing for belonging that drives us to keep trying, and failing, to find home in other people.
If Sophie’s debut LP Choosing explored the self-destructive urge that swells from running away from one’s whole self, I still want to share muscles through, song by song, doing its best to face it. It lifts the lid on the roots of how we love and digs in even deeper, leaning into our deficiencies but doing so from a stronger, healthier place that is much less afraid of the pain that inevitably comes with feeling everything.
I still want to share also feels more exploratory, playful, and detailed with a richer palette. All the raw emotion of Sophie’s songwriting and vocal delivery is joined by some new characters: twinkly, toy-like omnichord, brooding layers of harmonium and sub-bass, as well as rich string arrangements – courtesy of Josephine Stephenson (Daughter, Ex:Re, Lisa Hannigan) – that weave a yearning connection through the beating heart of the record. “There’s a lot of warm autumnal colors, and then more glittery, dark, starry skies. Something about it all has really come together to illustrate some things that I didn’t know I needed to articulate in this way”, Sophie explains.