Written, recorded, and produced almost entirely in his home studio in the seaside town of Muizenberg in Cape Town, Jeremy Loops’ third album, Heard You Got Love, is the sum of moving parts that flow together seamlessly. With a newfound confidence instilled by spending hours working with lauded producers like Simone Felice (The Lumineers), Eg White (Adele), and Jake Gosling (Lady Gaga), Loops has created some of his finest work to date, bolstered by a tight-knit group of home-based creatives that includes his late global tour manager, Fabian Sing.
“I think what’s really special to me about this album is that the songs have come from a much more certain place than I’ve ever been able to find before in my songwriting,” Loops tells Apple Music. Here, Jeremy talks us through the 13 tracks that motivated, inspired, and reinvigorated his passion for making music while he learned to navigate a new phase in his career.
“It’s All Good”
“This is a song about remembering to get outside and just look at what you’ve done already. Are you alive? If you’re alive and you survived another day, that’s something. None of us owe anyone anything. We don’t owe anyone anything being here. You can leave if you want to leave. You can stay if you want to stay, and if you’ve stayed and you survived another day, be happy.”
“Head Start”
“‘Head Start’ is just a really special song, lyrically, for me. It feels a little bit like the early days of making music for me, when it was easier to do what I’ve been doing. I’ve always approached music from the point of view of wanting to lift people’s spirits, my own included. I’ve always written from that place.”
“Let It Run”
“This song was written when I was just so absolutely in the waterfall of it all—heavy touring right before COVID-19, heavy writing, trying to finish the album. It was a lot, and personal relationships were suffering, and all sorts of things were suffering in my life. I just had to keep remembering about finding flow and taking myself to those places—for me, it’s the river—but I think, for a lot of people, it can be wherever you need to go to get back to your source. That’s what ‘Let It Run’ is about: letting the many things that need to run past us run past us, so we don’t sit there trying to get stuck in the current. Just watching it flow.”
“Happy Birthday”
“[The producer] Eg White really pushed the hell out of me. He’s from the UK; he’s well-known for being involved in some of Adele’s biggest hits. I was a bit worried about working with him. He’s got a huge reputation and also does much slower, gentle music with artists who have much more amazing voices than [I do]. He was like, no, he really wanted to see me work on a song that was absolutely core to who I am. He pushed me to sing it, and he just pushed me to my limits. I remember feeling so out of my depth half of the time during those sessions, but he was like, ‘No, push your vocal. Let your vocal out. I want you to sing it with your full voice.’ So, ‘Happy Birthday’ really bangs along because of that.”
“Sugarcane Love”
“I feel like ‘Sugarcane Love’ might be the dark horse on the album. It’s also one of the songs I’ve listened to the most—the way it all slaps together when it breaks just gets me. It’s difficult to be really close to your audience when you haven’t been touring for a couple of years. I’m not sure I know anymore which songs and what order they want them in, but I wanted to make sure this song didn’t get buried because I’ve listened to it so much.”
“Better Together”
“The songwriting with Ed [Sheeran] was super easy; we loved working together. I think we share quite a common frame of mind. So, it wasn’t hard to collaborate—that was actually the easy part. The hard part was getting the song through the gates. We got the legal stuff done. We found the right producer who understood the brief we wanted; we found all the right people we wanted on the track, and it ended up sounding beautiful.”
“This Town” (feat. Ladysmith Black Mambazo)
“I really released all expectations of this song from the moment that that collaboration with Ladysmith Black Mambazo was finished. I remember just feeling an incredible sense of peace—of like, ‘Yes, I wrote something which I know will always be something I can look back on, no matter what happens to the song, with absolute fondness.’ I don’t think that there would be anything that could ever change the essence of what ‘This Town’ represents to me.”
“Mortal Man”
“Definitely the most important song I’ve written on my journey so far. It’s the song that has some of the most heartfelt depth to it and came from a very authentic space inside of myself and seems to have been bizarrely received in that way. I think what surprised me about it is that it was one of the biggest songs on [South African] radio for some time. And I just couldn’t believe that. I was like, ‘How did this song, of all the things that I released, become so big?’ I think it just spoke to the authenticity of the lyric and what was actually being communicated in the song. It seemed to transcend the fact that it was a slow-moving, beautiful song and not necessarily formatted to do well on radio, but it seemed to find its own momentum.”
“Diamond Lake”
“The world really is going through a global depression, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. We’re going through a transformative time globally, and ‘Diamond Lake’ kind of speaks to the falling of the golden age. Well, what people might have thought was a golden age and the fact that that’s very much coming to an end in my view, and it feels like, sometimes, we’re all drowning in, like, this ‘Diamond Lake.’ This perfect, glistening place, which looks so easy and perfect, but it’s actually drowning people.”
“’Til I Found You”
“‘Steam train, souls from the city/We know no bones from the grave’—that’s, like, one of the best lines I’ve ever written. We do loan our bones from the grave. I thought it was a beautiful metaphor. We’re just all borrowing our flesh and bones for a little bit before we die again. If we don’t make a point of remembering that, we’ll miss out—we’ll miss the key.”
“Postcards”
“I’ve always loved that the lyrics led here and the song fit around the lyrics in a way, which I think is not the way that most artists write and not the way I’ve primarily written. I primarily write with the rhythm and the melody first, and then I start settling into the lyrics along the way. Whereas this one, I actually got stuck doing it that way and I had to stop and go, ‘Let’s just be super honest about what I’m trying to say.’ Then everything else fell into place.”
“Wake Up”
“‘Wipe away my tears, I’m doing fine/After all, it’s about the climb.’ I'm done sitting around. It’s time to stop feeling sorry for myself. This never-ending climb always feels like just an insurmountable mountain of life—that’s what life is about, and sometimes we forget that. This song was about that, like needing to wake up to the reality that life is what it’s supposed to be in every moment, and we need to get with that [and] stop wasting time.”
“Chasing Grace”
“In our lives, whatever it looks like with your set of circumstances, we all have to chase being a little bit softer and a little bit more graceful as we go. And it’s become kind of what I aspire to in my personal life when things get rough. Hope was always right there at my doorstep. And that’s why people used to come to JL shows. They were like, ‘We’ll go to a JL show, and we’ll remember how to feel good. We’ll remember how to feel hope because that guy just exudes hope,’ and that’s true. It’s been more and more difficult to do that authentically. And I have done that authentically, but it took a lot more effort, and finding and chasing grace—the grace to kind of forgive people who’ve wronged me, to forgive myself for the mistakes I’ve made. Being endlessly easy on myself throughout this process has been what’s allowed me to write these songs and find meaning in them and be able to deliver what I hope is going to be a joyful experience.”