Day 67: Jessie Ware - What’s Your Pleasure?
Album cover courtesy of EMI Records
Interesting day today. You think you’re feeling mentally stable, then boom: the urge to cut your own hair emerges. It always escalates, too. Should I also get bangs? What if I do a box dye! I am a grown woman with a job, I can just go to the hairdresser, I don’t need to be doing any of this. It’s a sign of some sort of impending mental health crisis, I’m sure.
Nevertheless, I’m cutting my own hair today. I needed an album to accompany my poor decision making. I wanted to listen to something sexy and happy to keep the spirits high while I make what is always a terrible mistake, so I went for Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? Also, I just found out she’s the other half of the Table Manners podcast. Who knew! I used to see clips of it all the time, she and her mother seem delightful. How did I not realise that was her?
Jessie Ware started her music career as a backup singer for Jack Peñate and SBTRKT, and shortly after touring America with SBTRKT, she got her own record deal. Ware’s first records were more R&B and soul-inspired, and she intentionally kept herself a bit under wraps to create an air of mystique about herself, but it didn’t seem to work: she said, “people just thought I was miserable.”
The podcast freed her to show a bit more of herself and her personality. While she’d been thinking about quitting music altogether because of low sales of her previous records, she decided to album that reflects where she is in her life. She released What’s Your Pleasure? in 2020.
The resulting album is confident and full of life. She says she wanted to make an album that makes people want to dance and/or have sex, and she succeeded. The songs are about having a fun, sexy time and prioritising your pleasure, and it was released at the height of the pandemic when everyone needed to hear that.
Maybe I was too focused on my hair the first time or maybe it just needed a second round, but as much as this record is straightforward disco-pop, it took until the second time listening to it until it finally opened up to me. It’s like the freshest possible iteration of disco music. As much as I like the bangers that she has on the first half of the album, she does leave the best for last, with the Minnie Riperton-esque closing track “Remember Where You Are”. I also love the tension in “The Kill”.
Jessie Ware was a good companion to my hair misadventure, I’m glad I listened to this. 8/10. And if you’re wondering, no, the hair absolutely did not turn out great. I was told this method was idiot-proof, clearly it wasn’t. Better luck next time.