That moment when we breach the threshold; when a crush turns to love and when our deepest desires are awakened, what do we do? Most people would consider the usually soppy confession, which usually doesn't end well. Or one could take a lesson or two from Jessie Ware's latest single, Midnight. Compared to the likes of Sade and Whitney, she is "capable of blasting the back window out with her voice, which consistently strikes blue notes somewhere between Sade and Whitney, but she holds back, well-aware of her unplugged environment". Her soulful tone oscillates between powerful high notes and softer notes; because what relationship is not made of the clichéd up and downs?
At the peak of the chorus, she belts out perhaps the thing that is on every one-sided lover's mind:
Maybe I love you, maybe I want to
Maybe I need you, maybe I love you
Don't let me fall through
Now that I need you
It's said that at the heart of the song: "the relationship at its heart isn’t a weekend fling or a casual romance: It’s real, risky love, the kind of love that can curdle into emotional devastation if you’re not careful" and "she’s never sounded more desperate, reaching into the upper limits of her range with an explosiveness largely absent from her earlier work." Her earlier discography includes the albums Tough Love (2014) and Devotion (2012).
So here's to the multi-layered song whose basic nuances speaks to us all.
Here's to a song that embraces a real relationship and all the hurdles that one has to go through, without ever knowing when it hits the end.
Here's to us, the desperate ones (maybe).
