A few years ago, when asked to describe her music in one word, Julie Doiron responded, “Life-like.” It’s a perfect choice for a few reasons. Since her 1997 solo debut, the Canadian songwriter has favored sparse settings, minimal overdubs, and no effects on her voice—an atmosphere that conjures the image of a lone figure trudging through snow, cutting the quiet in a calm, dry voice. But Doiron said “life-like” and not just “life,” because her music has an element of surreality: The lyrics—pared-down stories full of I’s and you’s that read more like stage directions than scenes—resemble life in the way a sketch or an outline does, asking to be overlaid with our own imagination to see the full picture.
It’s been nearly a decade since Doiron last released a collection of new songs under her own name, but I Thought of You shows no signs of the long gap. The music is instantly familiar, easy to slot alongside career peaks like 1999’s Julie Doiron and the Wooden Stars. Like that album, which paired Doiron with the Ottawa indie rock band, I Thought of You is a collaboration, this time with the adventurous singer-songwriter Daniel Romano. Over the past few years, Romano has tried everything—a prog suite with a member of Tool, a creative reinterpretation of an underrated Bob Dylan record, a thrashy punk bloodletting—but these skeletal country songs return him to his roots. Between the two of them, not a moment feels out of place.
The shadowy nature of Doiron’s music feels particularly suited for collaborations. She leaves room for conversation, pauses for a response. Consider the standout track, “Thought of You”: The lyrics suggest that Doiron has contacted us after an intense period of self-reflection, presenting the findings of her personal inquiry in the form of an apology. “And honestly,” she sings, her voice cracking, “I felt ashamed.” The subject should be heartbreaking, but within Doiron’s narrative, Romano hears something more like a psychedelic Western: It’s not a dark moment of introspection, his lead guitar line suggests—it’s a showdown, all taking place in someone’s mind.
Throughout these songs, Doiron shines as a vocalist. She has remarkable control over her voice, folding simple sentences like origami to reveal surprising detail. She uses no words in “Good Reason” that would feel out of place in a casual text exchange: “home,” “gone,” “coming,” “back.” Yet the way her voice pulls and falters through a line about a lover returning after a long absence—“He had said he was/But he hadn’t said when”—fills in the more poetic details: the narrator’s mixed emotions; the strain the relationship has placed on her; the emotional distance that remains as the physical distance closes.