Jay Putty
In this heartfelt interview, Jay Putty explores how friendship, heartbreak, grief, and lasting love shape identity, sharing deeply personal stories behind The People I Loved And Have Loved Me Back.
1. The People I Loved And Have Loved Me Back explores friendship, heartbreak, grief, obsession, and lasting love as different forms of connection. When did you realize these six songs belonged together as one project, and what did you want listeners to understand about the people who shape our lives?
I was writing the song End With You at the time. And it just hit me. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It’s actually seven songs now, because Lost In You fought its way onto the record. Every one of them is about someone who left fingerprints on who I became. They’re not villains, and it’s not one great love. It’s the whole cast: the friends who chose me first, the love that turned into obsession, the person I miss most in memory, the one whose actions finally told the truth, the person I’d want beside me at the end of the world, and the one I’m choosing, quietly, every single day.
What I want people to understand is that none of us is self-made. We’re built out of the people who loved us and the people who didn’t know how. If you cry at epilogues, or “found family” is basically a personality trait, this album is that feeling told in parts.
2. “Wild Hearts” celebrates friendship and the feeling of being truly seen without having to change who you are. Was there a particular friendship or moment that inspired the song, and how has your understanding of belonging evolved over the years?
Wild Hearts is for the friends who read every messy, unfinished draft of me and stayed anyway. For me that’s Rosewood, my friend group that’s more like family.
I was the weird kid, constantly told I was too much. For a long time I thought I had to edit myself down to be loved, and to be the funniest or easiest person in the room just to keep people around. Belonging used to mean performing. Now I think everyone is a little weird, and all of us just want to be loved for it, not despite it. That’s what Wild Hearts is: the people who looked at the real, unedited version of me and chose it anyway.
3. On “Worship,” you explore the point where passion can become obsession and another person can almost become an ideal rather than a human being. What did writing that song teach you about the difference between deep love and losing yourself in someone?
Worship is my unhinged, devotional, slightly-too-far love song. It’s the kind where wanting someone stops being cute and starts being a religion. You’d hand over your body, your mind, your whole self and call it an offering instead of a warning sign.
Deep love sees the person, flaws and all, while worship only sees the version you built a shrine to. Love lets them be human. Worship needs them to stay perfect.
4. “Memory Lane” reflects on how ordinary moments can become precious only after they’re gone. Is there a particular memory, person, or moment from your own life that you found yourself returning to while writing the song?
Memory Lane is about the moments you don’t know are precious until they’re gone: the last laugh, the last ordinary Tuesday, the last time you heard someone’s voice and didn’t think to save it. Life never gives you a chapter break before the ending.
I used to FaceTime my dad, and he’d pick up in the middle of laughing at one of my mom’s jokes, like it was the first time he’d ever heard her be funny. I never thought to save those calls. Nostalgia hurts because it’s love with nowhere left to go, but there’s still beauty in visiting it.
5. Your previous project, The Compass, focused heavily on surviving profound loss and finding hope again, while this new project looks at the people who helped shape the person you became afterward. How do you feel your songwriting and your perspective on life have changed between those two projects?
The Compass came out of survival. In 2022 I lost my dad and my friend Brendan, and I was battling a drinking problem because I had no way of processing my grief. I wrote Way Back Home in that place. Its chorus is about still searching for purpose, worn down to the bone, and finding my something out of the nothing. I felt like I had to live for them, and not mope in grief but find a way to carry them with me.
As I kept writing, I started inching away from grief and death. That wasn’t because I was over it. I wanted to explore how those feelings changed the way I love, both romantically and platonically, and how I carry people’s memories. The Compass was me finding my way back. This record is me looking around at who was there when I got home.
6. The project ultimately asks, “Who made you who you are?” If you had to choose one person from your own life who left an especially lasting fingerprint on the artist and person you are today, who would it be—and what did they teach you?
My dad, Robin. He walked into the bookstore where my mom worked, stopped dead in his tracks, and told her she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She said thanks, but she was engaged. Without missing a beat he said, “That’s okay, I can respect that. But you don’t know it yet, we’re meant to be together.” He came back every day that week looking for a “book.” Six months later they were married, and for almost 40 years he never treated her as anything less than the world he’d been waiting for.
His advice to me was simple: if you love someone, tell them every single day, and don’t ever stop yearning for them. Every song I write is trying to live up to that.