Across Wearing My Heart On My Sleeve, Katrine Schmidt leans fully into contradiction. Grief and gratitude. Longing and new life. Absence and arrival.
Written over three formative years, marked by the loss of her father and the birth of her first child, the album carries both rupture and renewal in the same breath.
The sound remains organic; live interplay, double bass, brushed drums, piano at the core. Rooted in American songwriter and jazz traditions, it balances light and shadow without losing intimacy or focus.
Created in close collaboration with pianist and partner Johannes Aaen Jensen, the record unfolds through hand-played presence rather than studio gloss. Mark Kühn (double bass), Aske Stubkjær (drums), Søren Schack (electric guitar), Mikkel Grue (acoustic guitar) and Thyge Van Dassen (violin) anchor the arrangements in space and breath.
I would probably say that my songwriting ranges from dreamy poetry to rather banal ‘heart rhymes with pain’ lyrics…
Katrine Schmidt says with a smile.
The album follows her Danish Music Awards Out of the Blue win for debut Laying My Burdens Down, but this second chapter carries sharper emotional clarity. The songs were written in real time, directly in the wake of illness, loss, disorientation, fleeting connection, and ultimately motherhood. Katrine Schmidt reveals:
The songs are about searching for answers, while trying to remain within the reflections without offering definitive conclusions. About accepting that life’s big questions cannot always be solved, but must be lived.
On Wearing My Heart On My Sleeve, beauty and pain coexist. Hope moves alongside grief. The record stays within that tension; and allows it to breathe.