Julie Doiron, ‘loneliest in the morning’ (1997)
By King Kenney
Released in 1997, Loneliest in the Morning arrived quietly. That quiet mattered. The year itself was loud with confidence and scale. Pop operated at maximum brightness. Spiceworld. Butterfly. Come On Over. Let’s Talk About Love. Albums engineered for impact, built to fill arenas. Soundtracks for a dominant cultural mood, with Titanic looping endlessly as a kind of emotional wallpaper. Everything leaned outward. Julie Doiron leaned in, asking questions, begging for forgiveness.
It was also my senior year of high school, and I was just beginning to learn how unstable feeling could be.
Loneliest in the Morning does not announce itself. It sits, revealed through spare guitar strumming, unadorned melodies, and a voice that resists projection. Doiron sings as if addressing one person, and not always directly. The effect is intimate without being performative. Listening can feel like picking up a landline receiver and realizing someone else is already on the line, speaking softly, unaware of your presence. You do not interrupt. You stay.
The songs are built with restraint. Chords arrive without flourish. Rhythms hold steady. Nothing reaches for drama. This simplicity is not a lack of ambition. It is a commitment to proximity. Doiron’s guitar playing leaves room for breath and pause. Her voice carries the weight of conversation rather than performance. Meaning gathers through tone and repetition, through what is allowed to remain unsaid.
Loneliest in the Morning endures because it refuses to compete with its moment. In a year defined by polish and scale, the album does not argue against excess. It simply operates elsewhere. Songs like “So Fast” and “Tonight, We Sleep” move without urgency, letting feeling surface gradually. Emotional clarity arrives without instruction.
Few songs articulate the texture of romantic love as honestly as “Love to Annoy.” The song stays with the small frictions of intimacy: affection that irritates, closeness that unsettles, familiarity that exposes habits we do not yet know how to soften. Love here is neither idealized nor dramatized. It unfolds unevenly, without resolution.
Doiron’s writing cuts deepest on “The Second Time.” The song names the exhaustion of repetition and the unease of going to bed angry again. Its details are ordinary and devastating: waiting for the light to go off, the absence of a good night, the creeping doubt about trust. The melody remains gentle, almost casual, while the lyric stays exposed. Desire persists, but certainty does not.
At the song’s close, a baby begins to cry. Doiron says, simply, “I’m coming,” and leaves the microphone. The interruption reframes everything that came before it. Emotional uncertainty does not disappear, but it is overtaken by responsibility. Care does not wait for clarity. In that moment, love is not language or reassurance. It is action.
The record’s impact was not immediate. It did not ride radio cycles or dominate year-end lists. Instead, it accumulated listeners slowly. Its reach expanded through word of mouth, through late nights, long hikes, campfire communions, through people returning to it once louder records exhausted their welcome. As ears age, they learn to sit with a wider emotional range. The ups and downs, the quieter intervals, the work of learning to love oneself just enough to love others without harm. Over time, Loneliest in the Morning became something to return to when music began to feel performative again.
Listening now, the album feels intact. Its intimacy has not aged into nostalgia. The arrangements still hold. The voice still feels close. Vulnerability is never framed as spectacle. It is treated as a condition of being present.
The voice on the other end of the phone remains unmistakably real.
In the context of its release, Loneliest in the Morning may have seemed almost willfully small. Against pop’s commercial momentum, it offered no counterstatement, no corrective thesis. It simply existed on its own terms. That decision allowed the album to slip past expectation and settle somewhere more durable.
This is a record that works slowly. It does not wait to be understood. It allows itself to be overheard.
Decades on, Loneliest in the Morning remains what it always was. A private conversation that continues, and I am still quietly on the other end, listening.