Album Of The Week: Jessie Ware Tough Love

Jessie Ware is through being cool. "Say You Love Me," the best song on her sophomore album Tough Love, has a gospel choir and an Ed Sheeran co-writing credit and a bridge that sounds like the song from Once that won the Oscar. It is a song that fully exists in Sam Smith territory. It's grand and hammy and sweeping. It's also an incredible song, a warm and instinctive plea to keep a relationship from falling into inertia death. Ware sings the fucking hell out of it. That part on the second verse where she goes from coo to sob to accusation to sigh in the space of a single line -- "Want to feel buuuurn-iiiing flaaaame when you say my name" -- absolutely reduces me to rubble. It takes every move from the big, gooey, sweeping pop-ballad playbook and executes it perfectly, hitting all your feeling-buttons with masterly ease. And if a song like "Say You Love Me" can break through to the greater pop-cultural consciousness -- don't rule it out -- I could see it becoming something like Adele's "Someone Like You," a song that can play over supermarket speakers and ambush you, leaving you misty-eyed in the cereal aisle.