Tenderness - Jay Som
“Tenderness” - Jay Som
23 August 2019 - from Anak Ko
Jay Som manipulates her voice to ride along her mellow rhythms. The instrumentation feels like a bright orange glow, and it helps give comfort to the precariousness of falling in love. Is the other person feeling the same way? What are we afraid of, anyway? Jay Som doesn’t attempt to answer these questions. In “Tenderness,” Jay Som proclaims her affection while fearing that it may not be received. In the end, tenderness is all we’ve got.
A soft rhythm from electronic drums welcomes the listener onto the ride. Chords from a warm-toned guitar glide over the rhythmic base before introducing Jay Som’s voice behind a lo-fi curtain. The lyrics are filled with the questions from a rising love. Though she is certain about what she feels, fear of the other person not reciprocating creates timidness in her voice. In the first verse, she wonders and even urges the other person to let her know if these feelings are the same. The heartbeat pulsing of the electric drums drives this urgency.
The second and third verses continue this rhythm as the sound begins to clear. Jay Som wants answers “before you haunt me on the screen,” referring to waiting for a text or refreshing someone’s feed. She is pulling something she’s already committed so much emotion into, equating it to constructing a city in her mind. She fears the other person might be playing games when she sings “nobody wants to play pretend,” but with a whisper-like “I just know that,” we fall into…
Full clarity. The curtains open and the full band rides along the chorus that repeats throughout the rest of the song. In this release, Jay Som opens her heart to the feelings she’s fallen into. “Nothing’s ever good enough” is the desire to always do more; we want to impress this person and have them fall for us. Without hearing it back, it feels like we’re not doing enough. But what more can we do to demonstrate this love? After all, “tenderness is all I’ve got.”
The sound is warm and dreamy, as are the feelings from spending time with a potential special someone. But not having anything defined can be grinding, just like the guitar solo. It’s not a complex solo, but the guitar’s tone is blunt and direct. It knows what it wants. When Jay Som realizes she can only answer for herself, the song swirls back to the rhythmic guitar and percussion that brought us here in the first place. In the last two choruses, Jay Som reaches for a higher key before letting the instrumentation fall back to close. There’s no need for another verse. We can ask all the questions we want, but Jay Som shows us that we can only be certain of what we feel.