There are moments in life for which we cannot prepare. Nothing about the foreknowledge of our frailties equips us for the finality of loss or the screaming, bloody magnitude of a new life’s first gulping breaths. Reacting in all our messy humanity to the shock of a world made new, in each case we confront a profound dislocation that upends fragile certainties.

This ‘tabula rasa’ offers a mirror in which to truly see ourselves, however fleetingly, as naked feeling things, mundane and magnificent, each a universe to himself. Pattern seekers at heart, we quickly reconfigure these new realities, projecting a sense of order on events. But we are changed. We cannot unlearn the truth of own mortality or the fragility of a life contingent. Scarred with knowledge, we press on in love, the twisting threads of a helix in a genome tracing an arc that reaches forward and backward.

This album was written in the months following my daughters birth and my fathers death six weeks later. In their brief meeting in a dementia nursing home, two ends of the circle of life touched, closing a loop I feared would be forever yawning. But in that cathartic moment, I felt another loop open and was shaken. I saw myself in my father, and my daughter in me and I felt joy and grief in overlapping waves, beautiful and complicated, which continue to ripple outward. These songs are my attempt to make sense of this incredible time – ‘A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted’.

I would like to thank Matt Robinson, Dave Hamblett, Kieran McLeod, Robin Fincker and Matthieu Michel who contributed so much of their courage to this music and in particular to Fred Thomas, the truest of friends, who produced it with such passion, holding me when I cried and laughing when I danced. I would like to thank Gérard and Sylvie de Haro, Matteo Fontaine and Nicholas Baillard at La Buissonne for believing in this album and for the love and care they brought to its sound. I would like to thank Chris Sheehan for being there from the beginning and Jason Mitchell for his craft. I would like to thank Imogen O’Reilly for her incredible vision with the artwork and how she used the wonderful photography of Dave Hamblett.

Most of all us I would like to thank my wife Rhia Parker. This record is her story as well as mine and I am forever grateful for her love and trust in letting me tell it, particularly on the song ‘Love’s a Tailor’.

This album is dedicated to Cora with all my heart.

Love is everything,

Jamie Doe
Autumn 2024