“Who said being sad is not a crime?” Shura asks on I Got Too Sad for My Friends. Regardless of the phrase’s origins, the English singer-songwriter seems blithely unafraid of any carceral ramifications. In the album’s opening song, she relays “crying in the backseat of a taxi in Tokyo”; later, she’s “out here in America/And I’m so sad that I am.” She wonders if “maybe I got too sad for my friends,” then, on the very next song, comes to a conclusion: “I got too down around my friends.” Occasionally, she looks on the bright side: “If I die,” she sings, “at least I don’t have to pick out a shirt to wear.” (And though she likely meant the question rhetorically: For the record, it was Arthur Russell.)
Perhaps it wouldn’t surprise you, then, to learn that Shura wrote her third album in the midst…