Canadian singer-songwriter Julie Doiron hasn’t released a solo album since 2012, but she didn’t disappear: she’s had her side project, Julie and the Wrong Guys, she’s recorded various EPs, and she’s been a welcome guest on albums by fellow thoughtful indie musicians from Mount Eerie to Daniel Romano.
Romano, his drummer brother Ian, and bassist Dany Picard (a Quebecois songwriter who’s also had Doiron as a guest on an album) form the support unit for her on I Thought of You, although the first thing to be heard on the first song, “You Gave Me the Key,” is Doiron’s voice, unaccompanied for a second or two, then accompanied by simple strumming for a few seconds more.
Those seconds are all Doiron needs to remind any listener that she hasn’t lost the qualities—the deceptively whispery phrasing, the plainly expressed tunefulness—that made her a quintessential alternative-music singer in the band Eric’s Trip and on her own from the 1990s through the early 21st century.
Now, she just sounds honest and real, rather than alternative, and the rock, folk and country settings of the album’s 13 songs emphasize the kind of vocal simplicity that someone often has to earn as well as learn.
The songs also emphasize creative continuity: Doiron released her first version of “Cancel the Party” in 2003 and her first version of “Thought of You” in 2016, but the grungy lilt of the former and the dark jangle of the latter don’t clash with the tone of newer tracks like the reflectively twangy “Darkness to Light” or the Silkworm-reminiscent slow stomp of “They Wanted Me to Say.”
If the tone is steady, the moods vary from the sweet and desperate hope of “Dreamed I Was” and the romantic despair of “How Can We” to the fanciful resignation of “Back to the Water,” and Doiron expresses each mood with husky knowledge. She can be welcomed back even if she’s never really been gone.
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