Nashville singer-songwriter Jay Putty offers in his six-song EP, The People I Loved And Have Loved Me Back, a deeply personal account of the complex experience of loving and being loved. Instead of viewing love as a single concept, he looks at the various relationships that influence a person throughout life, including the friends who make us feel accepted, the romances that overwhelm us, the memories we wish we could go back to, and the people we hope will stay by our side until old age. This EP comes after his earlier work, The Compass, which was concerned with coping with deep grief and discovering hope following a loss. In this new project Putty focuses on the people who have helped him through those difficult times and on the lasting effect they have had upon his life. The end result is a thoughtful body of work centred on a question that is at the same time personal and universal: who has helped to make you the person you are today?
The EP begins with the song “Wild Hearts,” which is a tribute to friendship and the rare peace that comes from being accepted without having to alter who you are. Putty looks back on the people who supported him as he was still learning to believe that he was deserving of love, thus making the song a key expression of the project’s main message. “Worship” looks at a more complex aspect of affection by considering the point at which passion turns into obsession and causes another person to be placed on an almost unattainable pedestal. The song “Memory Lane” then shifts the focus to nostalgia and the painful awareness that we seldom appreciate the significance of ordinary moments until they become memories; conversations, family get-togethers or the sound of a loved one laughing can acquire a different meaning after they are over. This feeling of looking back is then carried on into “What We Meant,” which deals with the gap between what is promised and what is actually done when a relationship starts to break down. All of these songs show love as something that has the power to comfort, challenge and transform us, while at the same time recognising that not every relationship lasts in the way we originally hoped.
The last two tracks lead the EP towards a more hopeful view of what is truly important. “End With You” pictures the end of the world and considers where a person would go if all their ambitions, possessions and achievements suddenly became irrelevant. For Putty, the reply is that one should be with the person who feels like home. “Growing Old” takes up this idea by presenting a vision of a lasting partnership, finding beauty not in grand romantic acts but in the quiet process of building a life together; its image of growing old among photographs reflects the kind of wealth that cannot be measured in money or professional success — namely, the shared experiences, memories and years that two people have accumulated. Putty’s own experiences give these themes greater significance. Having been brought up in a small town in Indiana before moving to Nashville, he has drawn on personal difficulties, the loss of family members to cancer, a terrible house fire and his own journey with mental health to produce music based on empathy and emotional honesty. Approval from PEOPLE, Billboard and Rolling Stone India has helped bring his open and honest storytelling to a broader audience, and this EP seems to be a particularly clear reflection of his artistic perspective. The People I Loved And Have Loved Me Back ultimately serves to remind us that relationships leave a lasting impression even after the circumstances have changed. Both those who believed in us and those who broke our hearts, as well as the people who remained by our side, all become part of our story. Finally, Putty leaves the listeners with a request to look back at their own lives and think about who deserves to have a chapter of their own.
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