“‘Cold Where You Are’ is a song about loving someone who is stuck in a painful place, trying to pull them out while resisting being dragged under yourself.”
Jillian Lake makes clear who she’s singing to. “I have your mind and your pale freckled skin,” she sings, and that familial specificity makes the emotional stakes feel real rather than abstract.
Unlike last year’s “Tactile,” which arrived as indie rock with electric guitars and a sense of forward motion, this one opens somewhere quieter.
The tone is tranquil, almost still, with an intimacy that pulls you close before the lyric has begun.
Her voice doesn’t sit on top of the music. It moves through it, and the nostalgic quality of the arrangement makes the personal subject matter feel older than it is, like something being remembered rather than described.
Produced by David Vertesi and Jonathan Anderson, whose credits run through Andy Shauf and Ocie Elliott, it’s folk in the truest sense: stripped back, close-miked, nothing decorative.
Jillian Lake has been compared to Feist before, and on this track the comparison holds in a specific way: the same willingness to let a lyric sit without pushing it toward emotion.
When she sings “Hate watching you settle for just breathing,” it’s not grief at a loss. It’s the frustration of watching someone choose the bare minimum of life. Both feelings are in the vocal at the same time, and neither one wins.
When the chorus arrives with “We’re brittle and broken, attached at the scar,” the lyric doesn’t announce itself.
Two people connected by a wound that hasn’t healed, maybe never will. The chorus offers no way out of that.
It lets the feeling sit at the waterline rather than pulling the listener back up, and the production stays cold enough to match it.
The cold in the title is still there at the end. Unaddressed. Exactly where she left it.
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