In her first stand-alone album in roughly nine years, Julie Doiron has returned to the airwaves with a new set of songs that are confident and original. The artist comes back to music as though she never left, which isn’t too hard to believe, as before she took her break she had been consistently releasing albums since about the late 90s. Almost a decade has passed since her last solo outing but having released two collaboration records since her 2012 album So Many Days, she still sounds as fresh as ever. Now, fans are graced with I Thought of You.
I Thought of You is a mesh of slow/soft and upbeat/energetic Music
There’s a lot of mix and match with I Thought of You. There’s a little bit of everything in her thirteen tracks, spreading herself just thin enough to grant enjoyment to a variety of different listener’s tastes or preferences. Above all else she still remains a force with her song writing, her ability to paint narratives, and she is always consistently being herself with making little to no attempt to deviate from what makes her fun to listen to. With a listening time of around forty minutes, I Thought of You is a mesh of slow/soft and upbeat/energetic, playing with different musical influences here and there just enough to make it interesting though not to a point of sounding like someone else’s work. Overall, it’s also just a fun album. Even when some songs lean more towards heartbreak, she finds just the right balance to keep things from getting depressing.
There’s no shortage of quality where the music arrangements are regarded. She clearly had the help of solid instrumentalists for the rock/country tracks like You Gave Me the Key, and seasoned producers on the more psychedelic songs such as Just When I Thought. The order of the tracks is near perfect, keeping the album from going too far up or down in mood throughout the listening time. Doiron’s vocals are still holding out after all these years, though with this type of music there’s very little need to test her chords to the max. Then of course there is the song writing, which is unlike anything mainstream artists are releasing and even less like what other art house musicians are experimenting with. Having had her experience with singing in different languages, she even manages to impress with her French single Et Mon Amour. No artist can achieve perfection, but Julie Doiron isn’t doing much wrong either.
There’s no doubt that Doiron is an excellent musician, but not all musicians really qualify as artists, and she is definitely an artist. The Canadian singer is beloved in her home country by those who’ve kept up with her career, but the recognition she has thus far achieved is nowhere near the amount that she’s deserving of. This unfortunately is the nature of the business, but none of this has seemed to slow her down. Nor should it. With good fortune, she’ll continue to keep working in spite of her lack of global reach.
