Jessie Ware's third album is packed with finely woven adult-pop ballads about lust, longing, commitment, and reassurance -- all traits shared with
Devotion and
Tough Love -- but it couldn't have been made at any other point in the artist's life. The singer and songwriter aimed to complete it by the time she gave birth to her daughter. After some critical straight talk from collaborator
Benny Blanco,
Ware scrapped an unspecified amount of new material and finished
Glasshouse after her daughter was born. The album's standard edition closes with the lone song where the references to
Ware's life are specific. Written before she had informed her mother of her pregnancy, "Sam" -- named after her husband -- articulates a mix of joy, gratitude, and anxiety via a predominantly acoustic ballad (an
Ed Sheeran collaboration indeed). A listener oblivious to
Ware's private life wouldn't know the full circumstances in which the other songs were written. When
Ware sings about missing her baby on "Thinking About You," she means her newborn, with the sweetly yearning "I just wanna feel every little beat when I'm thinking 'bout you" the only obvious indicator that she's not referring to her partner.
Glasshouse incorporates the work of over a dozen producers and roughly twice as many additional songwriters. The glistening "Last of the True Believers," a coup of a collaboration (though not a full-scale duet) with
the Blue Nile's
Paul Buchanan, tightens up the second half with
Ware fantasizing about an intimate retreat from the city. That song deserves widespread maximum rotation, along with "Midnight," an exquisite pre-album single co-written and co-produced by wisest collaborative match Pop Wansel (
Alessia Cara's "Here,"
Kehlani's "Distraction"). ~ Andy Kellman