We spoke with Janey Quinn about “My Melancholy” and more!

Q: Hi! So let’s start simple – where were you in life when this song first began to take shape?

A: Honestly, I was in a really dark place. I’d just had my first child, and life felt like it was pulling me in ten different directions at once. I was trying to recover, learning how to be a mum, trying to keep my job going, and at the same time, a lot of old stuff from earlier in life was resurfacing.

So emotionally, I was all over the place. I think that’s really where the philosophy behind the song came from. I didn’t actually write it at that exact time, though. It took me another couple of years to get there. I think I needed some distance from the chaos before I could really understand what that period had been trying to teach me.

Q: Do you remember the exact moment or feeling that made you sit down and start writing this one?

A: Yeah, I do. It was at night, which is when I’m usually reflective. I remember feeling this strange heaviness in my body, that feeling that something wasn’t right, even if I couldn’t name it yet.

What stayed with me was that I wasn’t angry at the feeling or trying to outrun it. I was curious about it. I had this sense that the sadness was trying to tell me something, maybe that I was exhausted, maybe that I was overwhelmed, or maybe that I’d been ignoring parts of myself for too long.

So I started writing to try to make sense of it. It first began as a poem, actually! Then later I picked up my guitar and it slowly developed into a song.

Q: There’s something really calm about the way you approach heavier emotions here. Has your relationship with sadness changed over time?

A: Completely. I used to treat emotions like natural disasters. If I was sad, it felt catastrophic. If I was happy, that felt huge too, so everything was intense and everything felt absolute.

But life has a way of humbling that kind of thinking. After enough years of feeling awful one day and completely fine the next, I started to realise emotions are a lot less permanent than they appear to be.

So yeah, my relationship with sadness has changed a lot. I don’t worship it, and I don’t want to romanticise it, but I don’t treat it like an enemy anymore either. And I think that’s the difference.

Q: When you listen back to the track now, does it still feel personal, or has it taken on a different meaning for you?

A: It still feels very personal. It holds a younger, more immature version of me that was really trying to figure things out, and I think that’s always going to matter to me. It captures a shift in how I saw myself and how I saw the world, so in that sense it’s almost like an emotional timestamp. And sharing my personal philosophical beliefs is a huge thing for me. I actually think people can sometimes understand me more through a song than through everyday conversation.

What’s changed is that it doesn’t wound me in the same way anymore. When I first wrote it, listening back could really sting, but now I hear it with a bit more tenderness. I can still recognise the sadness in it, but I’m not trapped inside that pain anymore.

Q: Your vocal delivery feels really intimate, almost like you’re talking directly to someone. Was that intentional, or did it just happen naturally?

A: It mostly happened on its own. But I think it came from the fact that I’ve always felt a bit defensive on behalf of sadness, which is probably a very strange sentence to say out loud.

I’ve always been bothered by how quickly people dismiss emotions like sadness or melancholy, like they’re useless or inconvenient or you know, somehow embarrassing. There’s all this pressure to be okay, to be upbeat, to “snap out of it,” and I’ve never found it to be fair. I really believe all emotions do something for us. They all carry information, and they all have a place.

So I think the intimacy in the song came from that instinct to defend sadness a little bit, to sit with it, listen to it, maybe even humanise it. I do love personification and metaphor as well, so that probably found its way in naturally. I’m quite drawn to things that feel a little theatrical, a little poetic, and a little larger than just plain explanation.

Q: Do you usually write songs to understand your emotions, or do you already know what you’re feeling before you start?

A: I usually know what I’m feeling. The problem is I don’t always know what to do with what I’m feeling and for me that’s where songwriting comes in. Writing is kind of how I force myself to think deeply (or deeply enough to make a song out of it!). I turn it over, look at it from different angles, argue with it, follow it somewhere. So it’s less, “What am I feeling?” and more, “Alright, now what does this mean, and what am I supposed to do with it?”

That’s definitely what happened with this song. I knew I was sad, but what I didn’t know yet was whether that sadness deserved resistance, gratitude, fear, acceptance, or some mix of all four. Writing helped me sit inside the question a bit longer.

Q: You’ve been away from releasing music for a while. What has it felt like coming back into this space creatively?

A: Honestly, it’s been liberating. Music is probably the only place in my life where I feel completely unfiltered when it comes to self-expression. I’m not trying to be useful, I’m not trying to be productive, and I’m not trying to meet anyone’s expectations. And I think that kind of freedom gets rarer as you get older, when you’re constantly having to negotiate who you are with other people, work, family, responsibility, all of that.

So yeah, coming back to it has felt a bit like coming back to oxygen!

Q: Has your songwriting process changed compared to when you were making music earlier in your career?

A: Oh, absolutely. Years ago, I was much more of a melody-first writer. I’d come up with something catchy in my head and try to build around that.

Now it’s much more lyric-led. Most of my songs start off looking more like poems than songs, which is probably why they don’t always behave like tidy pop tracks. They’re less polished in that commercial sense, but they feel more honest to me.

I think younger me wanted to make songs that sounded good and could get me famous! Now I want to make songs that mean something to me, even if they do not achieve commercial success.

Q: The song feels very stripped back. How do you know when to keep things minimal and when to build something bigger?

A: For me it’s all about balance. If the lyrics are carrying a lot of emotional weight, I don’t want the production competing with them. So with My Melancholy, I wanted it to feel close, almost uncomfortably close, maybe. Like you’ve wandered into a private conversation and you’re sitting quietly in the corner listening. I didn’t want it to feel performative or oversized. I wanted it to feel like being in a dark room, face-to-face with a feeling you can’t quite avoid anymore.

That kind of intimacy would have disappeared if I’d dressed it up too much.

Q: When people hear “My Melancholy,” what do you hope they take from it, even if their experience is completely different from yours?

A: I think I just want it to make people pause for a second. To be a little less afraid of their own emotional life. Not in a preachy way, and not in a “sadness is beautiful” kind of way either. More just… I hope it makes people a bit more curious. A bit more honest. A bit less quick to shut difficult feelings down.

I’d love it if the song made someone ask themselves a better question than just, “How do I stop feeling this?” Maybe the better question is, “Why is this here?” or “What is this trying to show me?” And if it opens that door ever so slightly, I’d be really happy with that.

Q: With your debut album on the way, how does this track fit into the bigger picture of the project?

A: The album is called Introspection, so this track sits inside it very naturally. The whole project is built around emotional reflection, the philosophies I’ve built up over the years, and the ways I’ve changed.

I actually see My Melancholy as a kind of hinge point in the album. Earlier songs sit more inside anger, insecurity, jealousy, resentment, you know, those sharper, more volatile emotions. Then this song comes in and something starts to soften. It’s the point where I stop fighting emotion so aggressively and start trying to understand it instead.

So structurally and emotionally, it’s a bridge. It links the darker, messier beginning of the album to the calmer, more reflective second half. If the album is a journey through a tunnel, this is the moment where your eyes begin to adjust and you realise there’s light ahead.

Q: Looking ahead, what’s the rest of the year shaping up to look like for you – more releases, live shows, or maybe something unexpected?

A: Definitely more releases. I want to keep putting music out as the album gets closer.

Live shows are still a bit of a question mark, just because life is very full at the moment, but I’d love to do some if the timing works out, even if they’re small, intimate ones. That actually feels more true to this music anyway.

And then there are the wild cards. I’ve been thinking about doing a music video, which could be really exciting, but I’m trying not to pretend I’ve got everything mapped out when I don’t. So the honest answer is: more music, hopefully some performances, and maybe a few surprises if life allows it.