Elijah Woods x Jamie Fine, the Canadian pop duo that burst onto the scene with “Ain’t Easy,” are doing some new math – and it involves the subtraction of Jamie Fine.
“It was a conversation and there were a few conversations after that,” Fine told iHeartRadio.ca in an exclusive interview Friday from her home in Ottawa. “One of the things that we mutually agreed upon was the really simple fact that we just see ourselves differently in terms of an artist. There were those creative differences.”
Fine stressed that there are no hard feelings between the two. “We looked at ourselves and I was like, ‘I want to be this kind of artist” and he was like ‘I want to be this kind of artist’ – doesn’t match up, OK, beautiful. It’s just in terms of the brand, it’s how we look, it’s the artists that we want to be – that’s where we really differ.”
EW x JF were thrust into the spotlight in 2018 when “Ain’t Easy” – a song they only had a small hand in writing – was chosen for release on the second episode of The Launch. The track quickly became ubiquitous on Canadian radio and the duo followed up with the EP 8:47 and songs like “Want You Back” and “Better Off." They also earned a pair of Juno nominations.
Fine’s solo debut is the raw confessional “Sellout,” a track co-written and produced by Woods, in which she sings: “Sold my soul to write some songs that I don’t care about / Tryna write this new one thinking that it’s sick / Probably stealing lines though from some better s**t / Anyways we’re high bro, sorry if we did / We’re just tryna write some f**king kind of hit.
“Writing all this pop s**t / Faking it in L.A. / Guess I should’ve listened / You know what they say / If you sell your soul for paycheques, you’re the one who pays.”
The song is the result of an internal struggle Fine had for almost two years. “I was waking up every day and I wasn’t the happiest I could have been,” she recalled. “I had this feeling of looking around myself and ourselves and having this overwhelming feeling of pride and accomplishment – and it was beautiful – but it was accompanied by this really strong feeling, almost stronger feeling, of never having felt further from everything I’ve ever wanted.
“I couldn’t understand why I had those two feelings together and I couldn’t understand the core of my unhappiness.”
Fine said there was no rush to go solo but she knew she needed to hit pause on her life.
“It was ‘I need to take a step back from absolutely everything and figure out why I’m unhappy and why I’m feeling this way and reevaluate.’ A lot of that was taking accountability and taking responsibility for why I was unhappy,” she admitted. “A lot of it was reassessing everybody around me and deciding ‘OK, here’s what I have to do for me.'
“The process made me fall back in love with music again and fall back in love with why I’m doing this.”
Below: Jamie Fine shares the biggest lesson she has learned from being in the music business.