Not For Lack of Trying (CD)

Not For Lack of Trying (CD)When dodie was just about done writing her remarkable sophomore album, Not For Lack Of Trying, she still found herself searching for answers. Shed spent the last three years turning inwards to pen what would become the sibling to her acclaimed 2021 debut Build A Problem (which landed at #3 on the UK official album chart), packaging her reflections on everything from falling in love and breaking up to comparison culture and struggles with depression.

When dodie was just about done writing her remarkable sophomore album, Not For Lack Of Trying, she still found herself searching for answers. She’d spent the last three years turning inwards to pen what would become the “sibling’” to her acclaimed 2021 debut Build A Problem (which landed at #3 on the UK official album chart), packaging her reflections on everything from falling in love and breaking up to comparison culture and struggles with depression. But she couldn’t quite find the thread that tied all of these intimate portraits of her life together; that was until she finally landed on a title that gave her the clarity she was seeking. “Not For Lack Of Trying is so simple, so sad and it really painted this picture of all these songs, of me trying to figure it out,” she explains. After that breakthrough, dodie wrote the pensive title track as a natural coda to a record which finds the North London-born singer-songwriter striving for meaning in a challenging chapter of her life. “Lend me joy I can’t see mine / But not for lack of trying,” she declares in the grounding final moments. “It was one of those songs that feels like it's already written, so you're trying to find it,” she says. Written mostly between London and Los Angeles and produced alongside Joe Rubel (Maisie Peters, Griff, Sigrid), Not For Lack Of Trying finds dodie learning to be patient with her own process, trusting that she’ll find the words when the timing is right. “I think I've finally learned now that the way I write is just very different. I just need to have so much more patience with myself — it just takes the time that it takes.”