Jessie Ware is back in diva mode. In the video for her new single “I Could Get Used to This,” the British pop star gazes longingly out of a window on a studio set against a verdant backdrop, the pink marabou feathers of her dress—and her tonged, wavy hair—fluttering under the blast of a wind machine. We see her reclining on a chaise longue, wearing a pistachio-green corset, surrounded by a cast of flamboyant (and fabulously dressed) dancers, ancient urns and columns scattered behind them. Next, we see her in a scarlet gown, plucking a pomegranate from an artificial tree, taking a bite, and letting the juices run down her neck.
It’s a playful, pastel-hued ode to carnal pleasure—and the confidence of knowing exactly what you want. (“Got you hot under the collar, and I’m burning, burning, burning tonight!” Ware belts on the track, just in case you didn’t get the picture.) “The first line of the song is, ‘Step into my secret garden,’” she says, laughing. “But we also really wanted it to set up the world that I’m inviting people to on this record.”
While the visual sees her embrace a sensual, sophisticated pop alter-ego, when I speak to the musician at home in the week before it’s release, it’s the other Jessie Ware on the line. She’s the personable, self-effacing figure who has become a podcasting phenomenon thanks to Table Manners, the chart-topping food show she co-hosts with her mom. “I had my veneer redone this morning, and I feel like I’m speaking like the Grinch,” she says. “It’s not sexy, by the way, I didn’t get new fabulous teeth—my sister knocked them out when I was seven.”
As for how she switches between Ware the pop diva, and Ware the affable podcaster? “Perhaps it confuses people which one is my main job, but I still think music is my main job,” she says. Still, “it’s great to have a space away from making the music, so you appreciate it and enjoy doing it even more—there’s less pressure, therefore, you can be more creative.”
That tracks: It was around the time that Ware’s podcast took off that her music career also enjoyed a well-deserved resurgence, thanks to the slinky, after-dark disco and house of 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure?, followed by the glittering, Motown-inflected soul and funk of 2023’s That! Feels Good!
Now, she’s set to return later this year with another (yet to be formally announced) album, which she’s previously suggested may be the third in a trilogy of Jessie Ware dance records. Given the sound has come to feel like her natural habitat, would she truly consider making a radical genre pivot next time around? “I feel like I cocked up saying it’s a trilogy, because maybe they’ll just keep on threading together,” she laughs. “I think that’s what will probably happen. I don’t think I’m going to go off and make a rock album or a folk album any time soon. If I’m enjoying myself and people are enjoying listening to it, I’m going to stay put in this world. But I feel like these [albums] do make sense altogether as a three-parter.”
.jpg)
If What’s Your Pleasure was set in a sweaty, subterranean nightclub and That Feels Good celebrated the campy glamour of music’s great divas, then “I Could Get Used to This”—and the body of music set to follow—will take listeners to Ware’s version of the Garden of Eden, a world where pleasure is anything but shameful.
“It’s really soulful,” she says of the forthcoming album, noting that she was inspired in part by Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, a 1970s compendium of women’s sexual desires and fantasies, as well as Gillian Anderson’s contemporary take on a similar format in her 2024 book Want. (Naturally, the idea was sparked by a conversation she had with Anderson on the podcast.) Adds Ware: “[The album is] enchanting, it’s romantic, it’s sexual, it’s confident, it’s celestial… It’s playing with the idea of supernatural and fecundity and growing and learning and feeling strong.” She was also interested, she says, in revisiting some of the themes and sounds of her early music, including the crisp neo-soul of her 2012 breakout record Devotion. “I think I wanted to go back to that era, but with so much more hindsight and confidence.”
Returning to the “I Could Get Used to This” video, Ware shares that she’s embodying the energy of the ancient Roman goddess Juno. “She was the goddess of women, of childbirth, of fertility, queen of the heavens—hence the pomegranates and the peacocks in the artwork,” Ware explains. But she wanted to lend it a “contemporary” twist, achieved partly through the fashion. Across the visual, Ware sports looks by Taller Marmo, Les Fleurs, and Tiffany Co. jewelry, and the dancers are in costumes designed by Ware’s stylist, Ella Lucia. Ware has worked with Lucia for five years now, and praises the “color and confidence” she’s helped bring to her wardrobe: “She just makes me feel incredible, and I feel like she’s really changed my course. I wear far more feminine clothes now and celebrate my body a bit more.”
That blithe spirit is on full view in the video: “We all feel like we’re playing dress up in the best way, and I think that’s what makes it fun. It doesn’t take itself too seriously.”
It’s also a neat reflection of the song, which was co-produced by Jon Shave (whose notable recent credits include Zara Larsson’s “Hot Sexy” and a slew of tracks on Charli XCX’s Brat) and co-written with Miranda Cooper, the beloved Xenomania songwriter behind some of Girls Aloud and Sugababes’s most brilliantly bold and unhinged hits. “It felt light and celebratory and fun and playful… it felt delicious,” Ware says, with a grin. Six albums in, it’s clear she’s having more fun than ever. “I’m feeling really good,” she says.
“What am I, 41 now? I’ve been doing it for a long time, but I feel more confident than ever, and I feel like it’s all meant to have been like this. I look back at videos of me looking incredibly awkward and apologetic singing, and now there’s none of that. It’s like, ‘Let’s bloody go!’”
