INTERVIEW – Inside Jessie Ware’s Queer Utopia : Disco queen settles the gay debate over her new album and talks queer Twitter love, big wigs and pop music’s disco moment

Jessie Ware sees all the fan-sent rainbow emojis on her Twitter feed, and "definitely a lot of Spanish writing and I don’t know what they’re saying to me but I love it," gushes the British balladeer turned disco queen. For the first time since releasing her debut Devotion in 2012, Ware feels a major shift, one her glorious soul-escape album, What’s Your Pleasure?, has afforded her. She says all this crazy queer love (rightly so; the album is, right now, the closest thing we have to a COVID cure) has been helping her ride out this miserable pandemic: "We’ve gone global, baby. We’re not just America. We’re not just UK anymore. We are global and I am loving it."
I connected with Ware recently to talk about a lot of things that were not things I planned on talking about with her. As we near the end of our scheduled time together, Ware says, apologetically, "I feel like I answered nothing," right after she asked me, randomly, unprompted, without any smooth transition, what I had for breakfast.
For Ware, finding time to prepare a meal with her two children around, I discover, has been a challenge. "This is what I do: I kind of go, ‘Why don’t you go up the hill and go get your hot chocolate, darling, so I can shove a bloody banana bread into my mouth?’"
Recently, Ware managed to steal a few uninterrupted moments to talk about What’s Your Pleasure?, which is drenched in the kind of sensuality that has made at least one gay man stop in the middle of sex to ask what song was playing (for inquiring minds, it was the title song). Even though Ware says she was "knackered" from trying to figure out how to promote an album during lockdown, she mustered plenty of energy to talk about that Grindr encounter, and whatever else came up.
GayCalgary: Take me back to the day when you told yourself that you’d give...