(You’ve Changed)The Canadian’s smoky vocals blend hope with pain on this laid-back album of lost love and new beginnings
![Julie Doiron: I Thought of You review – happy sounds from an unhappy place](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a6f225db3964bcef9675e45c2abed2a515cf7f0b/183_647_2625_1575/master/2625.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctcmV2aWV3LTMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=fbf8ced51a23b624f87fc3be8271bbc0)
You could think of the prolific Canadian songwriter Julie Doiron as a kind of unsung godmother to Courtney Barnett or the recent crop of North
American indie singer-songwriters. She has gone by many band names; occasionally she will put out a record under her own – sometimes in French or Spanish. Some of her noisier work is billed as Julie and the Wrong Guys; in 2019 she collaborated with Mount Eerie on a quiet, devastated album about him gaining and losing love after a previous partner’s death.
As comfortable getting messy in her teenage Sub Pop band Eric’s Trip as she is authoring this more hushed material, her latest record finds Doiron at a laid-back mid-point, fronting a band who can skew elegant or scruffy – witness the Neil Young-derived guitar solo on The Letters We Sent.