I Got Too Sad For My Friends is Shura’s tender meditation on significant chapters drawing close to an end and considering the emotional and mental strain of isolation. It lucidly chronicles a period of creative disruption and doubt caused by the pandemic, which cut short her experience touring her critically acclaimed second record, Forevher from 2019. Shura’s long-anticipated return hears the English songwriter and producer exist in a far more tempered and brightly-lit folk-infused chamber-pop realm invoking the likes of Tennis, Khruangbin, Bon Iver, Cassandra Jenkins whilst holding on to the playful release of Robin-like synth-pop. Here, her lyrics are striking in their frankness (their universality aided by Shura keeping a diary for the first time while living in New York) in how she articulates the impact of the unshakeable sadness that enveloped her in the months and years that preceded this affecting new material.

Speaking over Zoom, Shura told Northern Transmissions about not allowing herself to become creatively stifled, coming to terms with life’s uncertainties, collaborating with Cassandra Jenkins and why her excellent groove-laden third record I Got Too Sad For My Friends, due May 30 via Play It Again Sam, isn’t a comeback.

NT: I Got Too Sad For My Friends is such a great listen and a lovely album to fall back into your world. The vocals and production are so delicate which I felt nicely reflected how you were feeling in the time leading up to making the record which you mention in the press materials as one that was intense and isolating. Your attitude approaching this album was “If I never got to do this again, what would a kid version of me do?” How freeing was the experience of making this album?

Shura: It was really fun. We’re always asked, ‘What would you tell your younger self? What advice would you give your younger self?’ I sort of approached it the opposite way and was like, ‘Hang on, we’re always wanting to tell our younger self something, but maybe our younger selves have something to teach us or remind us of,’ because we’re separated by time from that version of ourselves. The longer we live, the more separated we are and sometimes we can lose a little bit of that spark. Approaching it like that was very new for me. It’s something I’d practiced in therapy, but not in my creativity, so it was really fun and exciting.

However, [the album] wasn’t always easy to make. There were lots of things I did this time round that I hadn’t done before which was scary. Working with a new producer for the first time was a decision I made and I knew finding the right person to work with would be hard. I’ve said many times that I could make records of Joel Pott for the rest of my life and be very happy, but I think there would always be this little voice in my head going, ‘Well, what if you made it with someone else? What if you tried something else?’ It’s like trying to learn jiu-jitsu in my mid-30s, where you try something new that’s a little bit frightening. It was a very emotional experience.

Being a musician and it’s such a strange, wonderful, and mad career. Especially for me with the way my career began from putting a song online and then the internet went completely bananas. By the time I was making an album, I’d been on this treadmill at top speed for so long that stopping and actually appreciating or considering what was happening was something I didn’t always do. The last time I played London, it was at The Roundhouse, and I remember looking and taking it all in and thinking to myself, ‘I can’t believe I’m playing this venue. I’ve seen so many artists that I love here,’ because I never, ever thought I would ever be able to play a venue like that, same with Glastonbury, which is still so weird to me that I did that. That was prior to lockdowns and everything shutting down. I’m so glad I got to do those things because I have these incredible memories and moments to really hold on to. But, also holding on to them when you couldn’t do anything was also really hard. I remember the first gig I went back to after lockdown was Muna and I was just in floods of tears for the entire time. I was seeing these amazing musicians who were born to do this and were so brilliant on stage and I obviously hadn’t played a show in so long and also hadn’t seen anyone do it in so long and I was just sobbing in a deep corner of the venue. It was just such a beautiful experience.

Going into the studio, being in this huge live room with all these musicians and knowing that we were going to record all together, which is something I hadn’t done before. We had four days to record, we obviously worked on lots of days outside of that studio time, but in terms of capturing the basic elements, we had four days to track 13 songs of which 11 made it onto the record. I found that I would be in the studio just crying. I cry a lot! I get emotional very easily.

NT: I’m glad that you touched on those milestones of playing The Roundhouse and Glastonbury because your latest LP is coming out almost a decade after you released your debut Nothing’s Real. In many ways, I Got Too Sad For My Friends is very reflective in its lyrical nature and it feels as though you’ve reached the end of one chapter and are going over defining experiences before heading into the next stage of your career. The song ‘Leonard Street’ comes to mind because that’s about you leaving New York. Would you say that this album has helped strengthen your artistic confidence?

Shura: Short answer: Yes! There are a few facets to this. One, I’m so grateful to my past self for making Forevher after making Nothing’s Real because I think that laid the groundwork for “This idea of an artist who isn’t necessarily going to stay in one place and isn’t necessarily going to make a record that people expect”. That wasn’t particularly intentional, it was just what I wanted to do. Luckily people, and of course, I’m sure there are people who are like, ‘Oh, it would have been nice to have another Nothing’s Real’, but I was really struck by how my fans were prepared to meet me where I was creatively. Rather than wish I’d gone in a different direction. That gave me the confidence to always do that and to follow what I want to do. You should always, in music, do what you want to do because ultimately people will still listen to what you’ve done before, if that’s what they like. I think people often want things and get them and then go, ‘Oh, I don’t really want that.’

I always see making a record as it’s not just music, it’s like a movie or a theatrical experience because you’re inviting people on an adventure in a different world. It’s a visual world, it’s not just something in your ears. That’s my favorite part of it. I feel like Shakespeare’s Puck running through the forest creating all sorts of shenanigans. I think that’s especially true of this record, in terms of how I consider it visually because of the medieval fantasy elements to the artwork. I will say that I’m not a confident person in social settings but I’ve always been quite confident creatively, not necessarily after the fact, but during the process. You know, while I’m working on a song, I’m always like, ‘This is what I want to do, this is what I’m hearing. This is where it needs to be,’ and stuff like that. Afterwards, I might worry about whether I’ve taken too much of a leap with some things but I’m never doubting myself in the moment of creating something.

NT: I’m curious to hear what your relationship to Forevher is like now, especially given how that is tied to a very challenging time with Covid-19 and lockdowns occurring and the music industry coming to a halt. During that time, you also found it very difficult to simply listen to music.

Shura: I’m so proud of that record and I’m really grateful for everything that I’ve made. I’m just so proud of that album which is nice because, you never know, there might come a time where you don’t feel that way about work you’ve done but I’m really lucky that hasn’t happened. I think Forevher is s interesting because [Nothing’s Real] was primarily about a break-up and the anxiety of having crushes on people that weren’t reciprocated or you were afraid weren’t reciprocated. The second record was, you know, just joyful. I always say it’s like a lesbian musical, I really wanted to make a lesbian musical with that one. If things go well, we’re going to turn it into a lesbian musical!

And so, it was really hard to have the tour cut short because it was so fun to play live. It felt confident and groovy and I was really enjoying it. And so, for that tour to be cut short, which was happening to a lot of artists, felt very cruel. I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t believe it’s happened to this record after the Nothing’s Real tour which I’d been playing for for two years. I eventually had to see it as the world telling me that I just needed a break. There was something slightly horrible about that which I still struggle with because it feels unfinished. And of course, I love the music on that album. I’m still with the person who I wrote it about and that still brings me so much warmth because that was the beginning of our relationship. Now my partner is like, ‘There aren’t enough songs about me on the new record’! I was like, ‘Everyone’s heard enough songs about you and there’s still a couple songs about you!’

It’s hard, though. I was dropped by my label after the first record, I was dropped after the second record. That wasn’t a new experience for me. Looking back on it, to be dropped at a time where you’re not able to do anything and they’re like, ‘We don’t want to carry on and by the way, good luck with touring, which you can’t do or make any income,’ it’s not a secret that I have all these slightly negative feelings swirling around how that ended. It feels like a really cruel time to abandon an artist. Whereas with the first time that I was dropped, I was sort of relieved, not because I had a bad time. I had a really great time and I made a record that I loved, but for whatever reason, it didn’t perform as well as what a major label would like. That’s fair enough, they’re looking at you to be a chart topping success. I was afraid that if I had to make a second record in the major label system, having not succeeded to their liking that they would have gone, ‘Okay, well, you did it your way now you’ve got to do it this way because it didn’t work.’ I was nervous thinking about what they might try to get me to do, so that’s why it was a relief. The second time was definitely hard, too, but I’m an expert now!

NT: Third time’s a charm! It must also be awful to feel as though a label is perceiving your music more as a product instead of appreciating the personal nature of the work. People love music because of the emotional connection they forge with an artist’s lyrics. On this record, your lyrics are so striking, particularly on “Bad Kid” where you sing, “My pills were making it worse / I had a panic attack and thought I was going to die. But at least if I die I won’t have to pick out a shirt.” Within that, you combine harrowing recollections with dark humor which can be seen as a coping mechanism when revisiting that time and having to be so honest when confronting yourself and how you felt during a difficult period in your life. How was the process of writing the lyrics for this album?

Shura: That’s partly why there has been such a long gap between albums. Some people have asked me, ‘Why is now the right time for a comeback?’ And I’m like, ‘It’s not a comeback. This is the soonest I can get it out!’ I wish it had been released three years after [Forevher],this was absolutely not planned and not in any way useful for me, whatsoever.

It’s hard to remember exactly the first six months or year of making this. I really couldn’t listen to music as soon as everything was locked down. I do sometimes suffer from trying to bear the weight of the entire world on my own shoulders as if it’s my responsibility when it absolutely isn’t. Obviously, we were inside and there was nothing to do and music is a huge source of comfort and joy for me, it’s why I ended-up becoming an artist and it was through falling in love with listening to other people’s music that I was drawn to making it myself. I remember [music] would make me cry. Hearing other people’s music, I just got so sad for all musicians because it felt like our job didn’t exist. It’s the thing that we do, in some ways in service of other people’s lives and our own, of course, and we’re just not able to. When you’ve done it once before, you know how important an album cycle is. You know how important it is to tour, you know how important it is to be in market and to then just be like, ‘Well, I guess that’s just that then for any of these records.’ That caused quite a lot of pain.

And then, because I wasn’t doing anything, I wasn’t able to write anything that I found interesting. In the end, songs are just little snippets of thoughts that you find interesting. Whether other people will find them interesting is up to them, but you have to be interested in it. I kept trying and trying to force it to happen for me. In the end, I stopped trying because it was so unpleasant to force something because I’d never had to do that before. I also thought it was probably not a good idea because then you’re going to end up having an aversion to something that you love. I started wandering around and taking notes and eventually I discovered that I could write that way. I kept a diary and I had never kept a diary in my life. When I struggled to write songs, I started keeping one because I wanted to at least know at some point what I had been doing and maybe something in there will work.

So, I kept a diary and there are bits of it, like I think of “America” and there are moments in there where I read how one day George Floyd was murdered by a police officer and the following day, Elon Musk was sending a rocket into space. They had to abandon the launch, but it was seeing how those events happened one day after each other which was a wild juxtaposition of two things happening. If I hadn’t kept that diary, I would never have known or remembered that those two things happened so quickly together. I had to stop trying to write songs and just exist and take notes and hope that one day the notes would be interesting to me. And some of them were, and some of them were just really boring!

NT: There are great guests which feature on I Got To Sad For My Friends such as Helado Negro and Becca Mancari, how did each of those collaborations come about? Especially working with Cassandra Jenkins, what was that like?

Shura: A dream come true! If you’d asked me like five years ago who my dream collaborator was, Cassandra would have been top of the list. I love it when life gives you treats like that. I suppose, firstly, in terms of the approach, I’ve done a few collaborations in the past and even though I’m a very collaborative person and love working with other people and love when different creative minds get together, like I’d love to be in a band. Anyway, with this record, I was like, ‘Look, I know that I love collaborators and I want to work with people. It was really important that I did that on this record. I really wanted to share a space with another person on an album of mine and not just a bonus track.

I think because of America being such a big character on the record, and that period of time where I lived there and the friendships that I made whilst I was there, it made sense for me to ask people who I’d met in that period of my life that I’d made connections with. Becca became a friend of mine over the pandemic and it was actually Becca’s A&R who texted me, I think. It was when we were all stuck inside and no one knew what to do so people were doing live Instagram shows. Their A&R was like, ‘I’d love you two to meet. You should chat to Becca, I think you’d really get on.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s have a chat!’ Becca and I had a phone call, it was like a friend-date phone call during The Pandemic, and we got on really well. They’re an incredible songwriter and an incredible musician and I knew I wanted to work with them.

Helado Negro’s music is music that I had fallen in love with because I had met him at The Lot Radio, he was DJing there. My partner was listening to his records and we would play them in the house. No one knows this, we would listen to his records a lot in the house. Me and my partner often do cringe slow dancing just for fun in the house where we’re twirling each other when we just need to smile and laugh, especially if we’re having a bit of a low day. We’re like, ‘You know what, we just need to do a little dance!’ We’ll do a load of twirling and spinning and a lot of the time, we do it to records of his because they’re sort of sexy and groovy feel good vibes. The song about my partner and our love, it’s really sweetto me that he’s the duetting with me on it because he’s the voice and soundtrack to our dances around the house.

With Cassandra, I’d seen her play years ago and was completely blown away. She was supporting another artist I love called Okay Kaya and I wasn’t familiar with Cassandra’s work at that point. I remember thinking, ‘Who the fuck is this? They’re brilliant!’ That’s sort of how it goes with me and finding artists that I love. I get completely blown away and then I need to listen to everything they’ve ever done. We then sort of became friends online and spoke every now and again. Then their record An Overview on Phenomenal Nature came out and sort of altered my entire existence and was pretty much one of the first things I could really listen to when I could go back to listening to music. Without that record, it might have taken another year to make my album! We might be looking at like a seven year gap. We’d always vaguely spoken about doing something and it ended up being this song which I’m really pleased with. I gave Cassandra options for songs to contribute to and the day before we were recording, she was like, ‘It’s going to be “Richardson’’ and I was thrilled.

NT: Finally, with a song title like “World’s Worst Girlfriend” and the album title being I Got Too Sad For My Friends, what advice would you give for maintaining meaningful relationships in life, romantic and platonic?

Shura: I think my advice would be different for friendships, and it definitely is true of romantic relationships, but something I’ve found myself getting better at as I get older. I don’t mean this in a ‘What you’re wearing’ kind of way, but to not be judgmental. There is no right way to live life. I may think that something someone is doing is not a good idea, unless that puts them in immediate danger, but I don’t think you necessarily have to share that. As a child, I was quite didactic and righteous. And I was like, ‘That’s bad. Smoking is bad,’ I mean, smoking is a really good example or something you should tell people not to do, but you know, I would always be like ‘This is bad and you shouldn’t do it.’ I’ve suffered from doing that but you end up creating tension and driving people away. My twin is really good at this. My twin really inspires me for being so accepting of everything, obviously not if you commit a murder, but just letting people live how they want to live. If that also means that after a period of time, you’re like, ‘You know what, maybe we don’t hang out as much,’ that happens and that’s OK. Just because a friendship ends doesn’t mean it didn’t exist and it wasn’t valuable and you’re not grateful to that person. I think that would be my biggest advice for friendships.

For relationships, it’s listening and remembering what you listened to. The best piece of advice that I could give, is asking the other person if they’re ready to receive what you are about to or would like to give. Sometimes we want to come home and tell our partner how shit our day was. Sometimes, both people’s day has been shit and sometimes you’re in a position, I think just being really, really honest in communication, I always ask before I vent and if my partner is ready to listen to me vent for two minutes, because sometimes she’s not. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love me and it doesn’t mean she doesn’t care, sometimes you’re not in that space. So yeah, listening and communication, they’re the key things, and being really honest.

Pre-order I Got Too Sad For My Friends HERE