With “Superbloom,” Jessie Ware continues her disco marathon and delivers the most ambitious and hit-filled album of her career. A conversation with the Brit who, between humanism and hedonism, has definitively established herself as the dancefloor’s diva.
“I wanted to create something that gives a sense of beauty, grandeur and majesty, while preserving a genuine feeling of intimacy, Jessie Ware explains when asked about Superbloom, an album that gracefully closes a disco trilogy started in 2020, in the midst of Covid, with What’s Your Pleasure?. The more I understand disco, and what I feel when I listen to it, she adds, the more I need to encapsulate this sensation on record. This ability to transport you elsewhere, bring you closer to others, put you at ease. That was also the aim of this album: to share the groove and the soul of dance music.”
In barely ten years, the British pop star, a former journalist spotted for her vocals on club sensations like Disclosure, Julio Bashmore or SBTRKT, has beautifully proven, with five albums to her name, that diving headlong into a solo career was the right move. A trajectory she hadn’t really planned, perhaps due to excess shyness or a lack of confidence. If her first three albums — Devotion, Tough Love and Glass House — ventured into a soft nu-soul tinted with R&B, positioning her as the missing link between Sade Adu and Adele in the eyes of the media, Jessie Ware flips the script in 2020 with What’s Your Pleasure? Producers, management and label all in, with now one bet: focusing on her new role as the future queen of the dancefloor.
“I feel creatively unstoppable”
Surrounded by the cream of English dance craftsmanship (James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco, Joseph Mount of Metronomy, Midland, Stuart Price), Jessie Ware fully embraces disco euphoria while racking up successes. With a contagious joy that remains intact on I Could Get Used To It, the first single from her new album and its video, hair blowing in the wind and wild choreography, an invitation to a secret garden where love and pleasure are celebrated, a theme that permeates this new record. Inspired by My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, the cult 1970 book about female desire and fantasies, by the figure of Junon, the ancient fertility goddess, and by the best-seller Want by Gillian Anderson, during which the literary and contemporary work of Nancy Friday, Superbloom is a total record, more instinctive and hedonistic than ever, a shot of positivity and a manifesto of empowerment signed by an artist at the peak of her craft.
“I feel I’ve really accomplished something with this album. I now have total confidence in my creative abilities, I’m less governed by control and I trust my instincts a lot more than before, confirms Jessie. It took me time, I’ve been my own worst enemy for so long. When I think back to my BAFTA performance this year, where I sang a Barbra Streisand song, not long ago I wouldn’t have dared to sing it. I would have sabotaged myself, because I would have over‑intellectualized the performance. It’s not that I have nothing left to learn, far from it, but let’s say I’m ready for people to hear me and discover me truly, in all facets of my personality. All of this is, of course, linked to the success of my food podcast, which I host with my mother, note editors), but also to the success of my two latest albums… All of that has played a part. And then there’s the strength I draw from my family, so I feel creatively unstoppable. Inspired, challenged, excited by the future and by this record.”
Jessie Ware, diva of modern times
An album marked by loss and illness—James Ford (Simian Mobile Disco), a faithful collaborator since What’s Your Pleasure? (2020), is undergoing treatment for leukemia, while Jack Penate, her best friend, has been diagnosed with a tumor and a loved one has been taken by cancer—Superbloom powers resilience with panache. Don’t You Know Who I Am is a disco tornado in the vein of Thelma Houston’s Don’t Leave Me This Way, Ride reimagines the Bon, la Brute et le Truand theme by Ennio Morricone as a diamond-bright blast, Sauna resurrects Olivia Newton-John’s Physical, while Mr Valentine nods to Gloria Gaynor’s Hi-NRG…
Produced by Karma Kid and Barney Lister, two rising young producers, with contributions from Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters, Stuart Price and James Ford, the album dives into the disco’s golden era, where strings and machines, melancholy and euphoria, darkness and glitter dance together while praising the diva stance that Jessie has acquired over the last five years, to the point of being today the only one able to cast a shadow over Kylie Minogue or Madonna. “I’ve fully embraced my diva side on this record,” she jokes. A diva for me is a woman with a powerful voice, but also an artist with a real connection to her audience. It reminds me that when I had Chaka Khan on my podcast — one of the greatest moments of my life, because she’s someone who inspired me throughout my career — she confessed to hating the word diva because, for her, it has a negative connotation, while I consider Chaka Khan the ultimate embodiment of a diva, and to me that’s the greatest compliment. It’s something I feel when the audience during my concerts sings back to me songs they know by heart; we feel so privileged. That’s why I include so many gang vocals on my records; it’s my way of imagining that one day we’ll all be together singing these songs.”
From Liza Minnelli to the Pet Shop Boys
Loaded with hit after hit, Superbloom marks the culmination of an artist who, after spending a long time questioning her path and pushing control to the point of calling herself a “studio dictator,” finally loosens the grip and makes room for her instincts and desires. An artist who reconciles with the soul of her beginnings on the sweet ballad Love You, and gives in to her music-hall leanings on Summers, a barely veiled nod to Liza Minnelli.
“I really feel that these three albums, What’s Your Pleasure?, That! Feels Good and Superbloom, work together harmoniously. Even though I didn’t quite get the exact record I wanted – the studio’s whims – I don’t intend to move away from this disco universe, concludes Jessie. But I want to explore something more electronic next time. Right now, I’m obsessed with the Pet Shop Boys, their melancholy, their orchestrations, their wonderful way of telling stories… That’s the direction I want to go. I even ran into them in a restaurant a few weeks ago, right after I’d been talking about them all day. Since my manager knows everyone, they came over to say hello. It felt like fate, I’m sure of it!”
Superbloom (Polydor/Universal). Out on April 17. In concert at the Casino de Paris on November 10.
