The expanded Not For Lack Of Trying arrives with a new song, “As Far As We Know,” and live reworkings recorded with friends. The timing says more than the tracklist does.
Deluxe editions tend to arrive as admin: a handful of leftovers bolted onto an album to restart its news cycle. dodie did something slightly different with hers, releasing the expanded Not For Lack Of Trying on her 31st birthday, with a new song, “As Far As We Know,” and live reworkings recorded with friends.
The birthday is the part worth noticing. So is the company. A live reworking made with other people is a record of how a song behaves in a room, not a demonstration of studio polish, and dodie’s writing has always depended on that kind of exposure, the unglamorous middle of a feeling rather than its resolution. Since her YouTube-era beginnings she has built a catalogue out of saying the thing plainly and letting it sit there.
The added material extends that instinct rather than restating it. There is a version of a deluxe edition that simply sells the same record twice, and this is not obviously that. Recording with friends turns the album back into something social, a set of songs being handled and shared instead of archived.
Whether the date was deliberate or convenient, it lands as a statement about what the record was for. Not a relaunch. A gathering.
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ROMBO Editorial Staff
The collective voice behind ROMBO Magazine’s news, reviews, features, and cultural coverage.
