Born out of some major life changes, Jake & Shelby find that things have just gotten away from them. On their newest single, “Fragile,” Shelby feels overwhelmed by their own fragility and finds themselves crippled with anxiety. With certain haunt and hurt, the song lets you dive straight into the pain along with them.
A lead single off Jake & Shelby’s upcoming album, Learning To Love, due out Oct. 10, “Fragile” explores anxiety while setting the stage for the whole project. After baring their souls over the course of the last few years, their debut studio album explores love in all its forms — falling in love and falling out of it, as well as chasing, questioning, and surrendering to it. The duo now faces independence and simply being tired of feeling “Fragile” on the new track.
Shelby sings, “I don’t wanna be fragile / It’s been getting in the way here lately / I just wish I could handle / Something, anything at all.”
On “Fragile,” Shelby shares how she’s moving into her own place and drifting away from someone she once relied on — a change from what we’ve been hearing from the duo thus far. Marked now by independence, and how it doesn’t erase old ties, Jake & Shelby realize that they can’t even protect them (“Guess there’s no use in locking any doors”).
A sadness echoes throughout this song, which distances itself from tracks like “Shut Up and Kiss Me” and past tracks “You Don’t Know” and “Loophole.”
Jake & Shelby use repeated imagery of waking up lost, unable to stand and gasping for air “like breath in winter,” as the pair face anxiety unlike anything they’ve previously faced. While haunting, its relatability captures the weight of how suffocating mental health struggles can be.
“Fragile was a song I had started writing when I had recently gone through some big life changes, and I was just so tired of feeling fragile. It felt like it got in the way of everything and I just felt weak. I have a hard time knowing if anxiety and other things I struggle with are from my own doing or experiences that people have put me through, and I was able to process some of that by writing this song. Even though our first time meeting Josh was whenever we wrote this song, I felt so comfortable being able to share all of this with him. The recording of this song felt magical. I would say this was the first song we recorded that stepped into a new place for us sonically, and it paved the way for a lot of this album.” — Shelby Haim
To celebrate the new album, Jake & Shelby will be performing a string of shows that kick off on Oct. 8 in Atlanta, continue on Oct. 12 in Nashville and end on Oct. 17 in LA. For ticket information, click here.
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