“Only In Love We Are”: Karen Salicath Jamali on the One Thing That Remains

Karen Salicath Jamali had already made a life that worked. She trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, built a career as a painter, sculptor and photographer with more than 180 exhibitions across Europe and North America, including shows at the Louvre. Then, in 2012, a head injury and the near-death experience that followed changed the terms of everything. She had never played piano. Three years later she began hearing complete pieces in her sleep. She would wake before dawn, sit at an old Steinway, and record what arrived, often with almost no revision. That method became the foundation of a substantial body of work: albums of solo piano music structured around angelic energies and their qualities, performances at Carnegie Hall, a practice rooted in healing and spiritual transmission.

For more than a decade that was the form the gift took. Then, more recently, something further opened. She began to sing. “Seeds of God,” released earlier this year, marked her first vocal recording, a sparse, folk-tinged meditation on humanity as seeds within a greater consciousness. Now comes “Only In Love We Are,” her second. It is also the most direct. The song distills the central revelation of that near-death experience into the simplest possible vessel: voice, acoustic guitar, gentle drums. During the experience she was shown, in her account, that everything else disappears. What remains, and what remains real, is love. The new single exists to name that truth plainly, without decoration or distance.

She did not set out to stage a return or to prove anything to anyone. She simply followed where the music asked to go next. The long years in visual art were never abandoned. They sit alongside the music, another way of working with light, form, and the emotional weight a thing can carry. The piano albums channeled specific angelic presences. These new vocal songs bring the same underlying recognition into a more personal, more immediate address. The courage here is quiet. It is the courage of someone who already has a life and still chooses to step forward with what the experience first gave her.

In conversation with Karen Salicath Jamali

We spoke with Karen Salicath Jamali about the near-death experience that reoriented her creative life, the recent decision to bring her voice forward in song, and what it means to carry the single truth that survived when everything else fell away into a new, more direct form.

1. The near-death experience in 2012 is the clear turning point in your story. What was it about that event, or the way the music first arrived afterward, that made this particular truth about love feel ready to be sung now rather than remaining within the instrumental work?

These songs have now begun to come to me. I get some songs in dreams and write them down, as poetry, and others just come by themselves. I believe these songs was not ready before now. For me, it is an important message I received, and I like to share this with all humans. This is coming clear to me to give this in words, also. I literally saw that we all are coming from the same place, and we all are covered in Love, that life itself is love, nothing else really exists. In its highest expression, art is indeed healing.

2. “Only In Love We Are” is your second vocal recording, following “Seeds of God.” What changed in you, or in the way the music was arriving, that made singing feel like the necessary next step?

It just came to me that I have to sing these songs, they are coming in the same stream of music, I’m receiving.

3. The arrangement is deliberately spare: voice, acoustic guitar, gentle drums. What did you want that simplicity to create for the listener?

I like to create a spacious room, a room where you feel you are floating with the music, and in simplicity, you often find an honest connection.

4. You have long described receiving music in dreams and recording it at first light with minimal editing. Did “Only In Love We Are” arrive through that same channel, or did bringing it into sung form require a different kind of attention?

This song I received in dreams as a poem, the music came by itself, and yes it is the same channel I receive from.

5. Before the music you had a long and established career in visual art, with major exhibitions and a deep material practice in painting and sculpture. Does that background still shape how you think about the emotional weight or structure of a song?

Yes for sure, I see a lot of similarities, in my song, the way it is built up, shaped, in forms, colored in tones, for holding the balance, but most of all the way the energies are poured down in the music, this is the art, the connection, from another place, which is manifesting in the songs and the music. It’s all coming from there; it’s all already made from one primal source.

6. Your piano albums often work with specific angelic energies and presences. This new song feels more personal and testimonial. How do you see the relationship between those two bodies of work at this point in your practice?

In my art, I have always created angels, in my Piano music, there are a lot of angels, in these songs, there are some explanations or realizations of creation, on a spiritual level. I see the difference that the songs are more figurative art, and the piano is more abstract art.

7. When listeners hear “Only In Love We Are,” especially if they are moving through difficulty or loss, what do you most hope stays with them?

That they know, they are always immersed in love, love is the only thing there exist, so if they would turn inwards, and feel this love for the self and for others, for nature and this world. And know we are all connected in the same space in love. I hope it will give them inspiration.

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“Only In Love We Are” is out now.

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