Remember Where You Are

Jessie Ware closes her What's Your Pleasure? album with this baroque-pop symphony that laments the state of modern politics. The heart of the city is on fire Can't we keep loving, on the edge of doubt? But nothing is different in my arms So darling, remember Where you are, where you are Ware wrote the song with Zimbabwean singer-songwriter Shungudzo and American songsmith Daniel Parker in the summer of 2020. A staunch Labour supporter, Ware was despondent at Boris Johnson's Conservatives getting back into power, and with President Trump's visit to London. Though she felt everything was going up the pan, she still had her marriage to childhood sweetheart Sam Burrows and her children to cuddle. "It felt like us acknowledging the state of what's going on," Ware told the BBC, "and that a bit of intimacy and love can always work a treat."

Frequent Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford helmed "Remember Where You Are." Ware explained to the BBC that the song's chamber folk soul sound was inspired by the spiritual optimism of Minnie Ripperton's 1970 soul track "Les Fleurs." "We were totally trying to do 'Les Fleurs,'" said Ware. "We wanted it to feel like an overture. For it to be a group vocal but to be sung with drama."

Ware envisages the song soundtracking the closing credits of a film version of Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. "I was imagining that it would be one of those songs that was played at the end of The Handmaid's Tale," she told The Independent. "It's about observing the world being on fire. And wow, we are living that dystopian nightmare right now."