“I’m not dreaming anymore,” sings Joni on her debut record Things I Left Behind (2025). Part breakup album, part flourishing self discovery, the album explores the nonlinear nature of growth. She’s split between the past and the future, Los Angeles and London, herself and someone she loves.
She starts at the beginning, describing meeting her ex in music school and becoming entwined, her artistic identity developing inside the confines of their relationship. “It was very easy to mesh myself with this other person,” she said, “But when everything fell apart, it was my career, my personal life, my art–everything.” The breakup forced her to find clarity on who she was, as a musician and as a person.
Though she had tried to work with other producers throughout their relationship, Joni never felt comfortable with them and found herself stuck. “It was just easier,” she remembers, “When we broke up I had to ask myself, What is my taste? What are my choices in this? What do I want from the recording process? How do I want it to feel when I’m making it?” For the first time, Joni was questioning aspects of her artistic identity that seemed fixed, and realizing they were anything but. The guardrails were down–in this way, she made Things I Left Behind.
After spending most of her career as a songwriter, she felt insecure about never experiencing heartbreak: “How can I write about it if I’ve never experienced it?” Joni recalls her first heartbreak with a silver lining, a flash of realization that she now had her own story to tell. “You have to go through something like that to understand how naive you are to start,” she says.
She began to encounter a new kind of writing, one in which the work came out like puzzle pieces that she had to assemble consciously. The control she had over the process, from her voice to the production, made her realize that she wasn’t fulfilled as a songwriter for other artists, at least not ones with whom she has no connection. She specifically cites “Strawberry Lane,” a song that references hyper-specific aspects of her own life, as a moment of self-understanding: “Turning this mess of a situation into something that has meaning; it’s very gratifying.”
On the title track of the record, Joni describes her artistic career with an ironic tone, “Now I worry for a living.” She credits her unique childhood, spent moving around for her parents’ work, with her keen observing eye and analytical mind, which she sees as essential skills for songwriting. This placelessness is present on the record, reflecting a relocation to Los Angeles that precipitated the breakup and then a subsequent solo move to London, where she’s now based. “I never really felt like LA was mine,” she remembers, “But that’s a common feeling I’ve had throughout my life.” She recorded much of the record in LA, with her collaborator Luke Sital-Singh, and felt a fondness for it, despite its never being the home she envisioned. “It’s always easy to love a place once it’s gone.”
It’s easy to love people once they’re gone too. The record jumps through the timeline of the relationship and its aftermath, rejecting a linear narrative for the sake of presenting a bigger feeling. Joni’s reclamation of her identity leaves space for the permanency of people, like imprints that won’t fade. The first track, “Your Girl,” seems to accept this nuance: “When do the flowers start to thaw? / Keeping your picturеs on my wall / Oh, there are four billion in the world / But somehow I'll always be your girl.” This clearsightedness, which acknowledges the complexity of love and loss in real life, is refreshing in a pop landscape of clean breaks. Joni extends the grace to herself as well: “I feel like I was twenty different people over the course of the record. It took a long time.” Good things often do.