Jade Thirlwall on stage in 2019Jade Thirlwall has unveiled her first ever solo single – and it’s fair to say she’s not exactly playing it safe.
On Thursday evening, the former Little Mix star’s first offering as a solo artist, Angel Of My Dreams, had its first play on Radio 1.
The experimental track quickly captured listeners’ attention thanks to its unique structure and lyrical content – not to mention the fact it changes tempo three times in as many minutes.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, it also incorporates a distorted sample of Sandie Shaw’s Eurovision-winning signature tune Puppet On A String.
And it turns out this is an idea Jade actually came up with years ago.
“I’ve been trying to sample Puppet On A String for years,” she said in a voicenote uploaded to Spotify before Angel Of My Dreams was released.
“I had a session [...] years ago…and [the producer] did a session and was like ‘do you remember when you used to try and sample Puppet On A String all the time?’. I was like, ‘that’s so random that you remember that about me, I mustn’t have let it go’. I was like ‘oh, well maybe we should do it’.”
Sandie Shaw performing Puppet On A String in 1967Elaborating more about the song choice in a press release for Angel Of My Dreams (via Genius), Jade said: “In the beginning of our career you do think you are this puppet, but at the same time it isn’t true – we wrote a lot of our songs, and we were behind a lot of what we put out there I resented that as a statement.
“So it felt natural to take that and show that it can be true and untrue at the same time.”
Jade has said that Angel Of My Dreams is her way of addressing her feelings on the music industry at large, after 10 years as a member of the chart-topping girl group Little Mix.
In the lead-up to its release, The Sun claimed that Angel Of My Dreams featured a lyrical pop at Simon Cowell, when Jade sings that she “sold my soul to a psycho”, an apparent nod to the former X Factor judge’s now-defunct Syco record label.
“It’s not specifically about that,” she said when asked about these reports by Beat magazine. “But I wanted the song to be my journey, from entering the music business to now, and what that’s felt like. That’s why the song feels so chaotic.
“The opening is like the music to that montage bit on The X Factor after you’ve won and you’re just catapulted into the industry.”
She added: “I don’t want to sit here and bash the last 13 years of my life. I’m very happy and content. But like with any job, there are highs and lows. That’s just life, and it’s my reality, but it’s about writing it in a way that’s not woe is me.”
