Jessie Ware - "You & I (Forever)". One of the common tricks to pop songwriting is to write verses with specific, sited details, and then, in the chorus, to go big and universal. With "You & I (Forever)", Ware deploys an inverse strategy: the chorus contains the song's only specific reference, a line about going to tea. It's a subtle move but something in it, what she says and how it lands - it gets me verklemmt. I am, like most living humans, a sucker for the happy-sad; and although I'm skeptical toward this song's hamfisted interpolation of The xx, I love the shearing lap of the production, the buried drone, and that plaintive loon-call of a sample. Mostly I love that line, about tea, what she says and how it lands. I'm listening to a pleasant, melancholy pop song and then she sings she Only wanted tea with you, and I find myself in particular memories, or imagined memories, a hapless heart in a certain place & time. [from Tough Love - buy]

Jessie Ware - "12". You can dial back a song: you can dial back a song to make it less of a song, a sketch not a drawing. "12" is full of line and colour, crosshatching, but it is sparer than most of what Ware's now up to. It is a place where the sun is slowly rising, slow as ever, half-formed shapes slowly lit up and warmed. ["12" is a Tough Love B-side.]

(image is Bruce Conner's "Sound of Two Hand Angel", from 1974)