Karen Salicath Jamali Among the Voices of Devotional Music

Some artists write about spiritual experience. A smaller number write from inside one, treating the song as a report back rather than a reflection on. Karen Salicath Jamali belongs to that second, rarer group, and "Only In Love We Are" is the clearest evidence yet of where she sits among the handful of artists who have tried to do the same thing. The nearest comparison is Enya, whose entire catalogue trades in the same hushed, cathedral-sized intimacy, the human voice folded into something larger than a pop performance. But Enya builds that atmosphere through dense layering, a choir made of one singer multiplied many times over. Jamali does the opposite. "Only In Love We Are" is built from voice, guitar, and drums, a far more exposed arrangement, closer to the rawness of Jeff Buckley's Grace, where a single unadorned voice had to carry the entire emotional weight of the song. There is no hiding in a mix this spare. Every held note is a decision made in public. The subject matter she is working with has its own lineage too. Alice Coltrane's turn toward devotional music after profound personal loss, and Cat Stevens's spiritual reckoning that eventually became Yusuf Islam, both share a quality that separates real testimony from ordinary songwriting: neither artist tried to argue the listener into belief. They simply stood inside their conviction and let the music transmit it. Jamali's own description of "Only In Love We Are," that love is the only thing that survives, that everything else fades, reads the same way. It is not a pitch aimed at a skeptic. It is a description offered by someone for whom the question is already settled. Then there is Loreena McKennitt, whose Celtic-inflected, meditative recordings function less as songs than as invitations into contemplation, and Leonard Cohen, who spent a career compressing enormous, almost unspeakable ideas into single plain sentences that could carry them whole. Jamali's own compressed line, that we are only truly alive in love, works from that same instinct: take the cosmology and reduce it until one sentence can hold it. Where she differs from all of these reference points, and where "Only In Love We Are" earns its place rather than simply echoing its predecessors, is in how directly it follows a debut single built from the same well. Most artists arrive at this kind of devotional voice once, if ever. Jamali has now done it twice in two months, and the second attempt reaches further into conviction than the first did.