Indie
Jamie T says he’s still working out how to continue his career “safely” after hitting burnout
Jamie T admits he’s still figuring out how to keep making music without sacrificing his mental health, saying he’s navigating burnout and trying to find a safer way to stay in the industry.
Jamie T has opened up about the toll his career has taken on him, revealing he’s still trying to find a way to move forward that protects his wellbeing.
The indie favourite recently said he “felt like something was over” after his huge 2023 Finsbury Park show, and now he’s expanded on that feeling in a new interview with NME following his surprise Reading Festival set.
Asked whether he genuinely felt finished, he explained: “I never know with things like that. I’m not that dramatic, really. I definitely felt something had turned in my mind, and I think I was burnt out by that point, as well. Something in my mind was telling me something’s not right.”
He said the past few years have forced him to reassess how he works: “I think I’ve had to learn, and I still am in the process of learning as an adult how I’m going to carry on and proceed to do this as a job if I want to do it. Because, in hindsight, it was taking too much of a toll on me, whether that be burnout or mental health and things like that.”
Jamie added that he’s still trying to find a version of the job that feels sustainable: “I feel like I still am working out a way of doing it where I feel safer in this experience. So I’d love to keep going with it.”
His forthcoming album Ghosts (100 Days of Mourning) pulls together years’ worth of voice memos, and he says revisiting them became a way to finally “process” parts of his life he’d never stopped to examine.
He explained: “I hadn’t done a lot of that in my career. It’s been so fast, and I’ve just always been on the go. I don’t think I had ever really had a minute to think about it, so it was really important. I’ve come out the other side of that, and I look back more fondly now on it all than I maybe did a few years ago.”
He said some ideas kept resurfacing over the years, so he made a conscious effort to finish them and “put things to bed a bit”.
Ghosts (100 Days of Mourning) is released on October 9. Check out the lead single, 3310, below.
