In a world coming into flower, Karina Kampe dares to perform the quiet pain which flowers too, especially when everyone else is doing well. Her latest single, "Springtime," is not your usual seasonal serenade. It's a bittersweet jazz-soaked confession for the rest of us who flinch at feelings and flounder in the face of new beginnings. Tagged as "a love song for the emotionally allergic," Kampe turns the springtime trope inside out with elegant irony and poetic precision. With a mild, jazzy sway of a song, it quickly opens into a wry meditation on post-breakup blues, the kind that sneaks up long after you think you've gotten over things. The piano glows like rain-slicked pavement in sunlight, with Kampe's voice looping through every verse with wistful precision and canny reserve.
There is a vividness to her storytelling, a visceral quality and Kampe traces a scene in which coffee tastes too lonely and cherry blossoms too romantic, and even snow is secretly desired if only to suspend the seasonal need to move on and feel better. It's this tension that "Springtime" wrings, a song about wanting to bloom but not knowing how. Kampe's way of describing lyrics is both intimate and ironic, and it is a dance that feels as natural as a shift in weather. She gets the messy beauty of being human, the yearning to connect and to run from it simultaneously. This is a jazz-laced shrug from someone who knows she's a little hard to handle and isn't trying to change that.
Deep down, Karina Kampe has always been a storyteller, and "Springtime" reveals her ability to merge poetic and personal. Through a voice that reads both timeless and powerfully fresh, she's a singer who will make you feel seen in your contradictions. This is a breakup song for the ages, a number not only for the lovelorn but also for the quietly disoriented, the romantically apathetic, and all who have ever felt out of tune with the season. In "Springtime," Kampe has achieved a plush, sad masterpiece, one more about thawing than blooming and all the lovelier for it.