Returning on Her Own Terms: Jessica Curry’s Shielding Songs
Returning on Her Own Terms: Jessica Curry’s Shielding Songs
After years of illness, loss and industry burnout, composer Jessica Curry talks candidly about rebuilding her life, the power of community, and why her new choral album is a quiet act of reclamation.
Words by Loren Sunderland
Jessica Curry arrives without fanfare, there’s a gentle clarity to her presence, the kind that comes from having lived through a lot. “I didn’t think I’d write music again,” she says. After years marked by personal loss, chronic illness, industry burnout, and silence, she’s just released Shielding Songs - a luminous new choral album recorded with London Voices. This isn’t a return to form so much as a return to herself. In her absence from public life, Curry quietly stitched herself back together, and the music holds that history like a soft, strong hand.
She’s best known for emotionally potent scores, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. Co-founding The Chinese Room with her husband, writer and designer Dan Pinchbeck, she helped change the conversation around video game music. Her work has always pushed against form, occupying a rare place between the sacred and the cinematic, but it’s not just the sound that defines her, it’s the ethic. Everything she creates is infused with a deep sense of responsibility: to story, to craft, to care.
When we speak, Curry is kind, dryly funny, and luminously thoughtful. There’s an attentiveness in the way she talks; she makes space for mess and vulnerability, never reaching for a quick resolution or an easy answer. “It’s weird talking to people again,” she admits. “It’s been so long.” Shielding, for Jessica, started as a medical necessity - she had no choice but to stay home, to keep her world small. But over time, it became something bigger: a way of life, a lens through which she watched the world change from afar. “So much has changed since I came out of shielding,” she told me. “People talk differently now, there’s no chatting, no flirting! Just people starting into their phones. It was a dystopian sight,” she laughs.
“Every score, every piece, it’s care. That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”
Shielding Songs is a clear return to the world for Curry, but on her terms. It’s a record made entirely on her scale: intimate, handmade, deliberate. “The scale felt manageable,” she says. “I knew the singers. I knew they had my back.” Before recording, she handed the choir printed stories behind each song, not scores or notes, but stories. “I wanted them to understand what they were singing about. I think you can hear that.” And you can, the record feels like being held, like someone has sat beside you in silence, it doesn’t chase a climax, and it truly honours what it means to endure.
As we talk about the album, Curry reflects on the themes that have always been threaded through her work: social responsibility, community and emotional truth. “I never saw it until I put this album together,” she says. “But it’s all there. Every score, every piece, it’s care. That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”
Now, there’s a sense that she’s living in hard-earned alignment, not because she’s striving for balance, but because she’s refusing everything that doesn’t fit. She’s walked away from AAA game studios, major record label offers, career-defining commissions, all because they asked too much and gave too little. “I felt like I had to become someone else just to survive,” she says of her time in games. “I was surrounded by people telling me I couldn’t do things. I had to become… I don’t even know who. But it wasn’t me.”
She speaks openly about the emotional labour women, especially disabled women, are expected to carry: the mentoring, the advocacy, the constant need to justify your place in the room. “While the men are advancing their careers,” she says, “I was in the trenches for everyone. And it meant I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t making.” When she shares this, there’s no resentment in her voice, just recognition. “It cost me time. And I want that time back.”
These days, she doesn’t want to scale; what she’s looking for now is small, meaningful things: a new choral piece this month, maybe five minutes of music, a repaired relationship with the piano she hasn’t touched in years. “She became the enemy,” Curry says, gesturing to the instrument behind her. “I sat down the other day, and it was awful. My fingers didn’t work like they used to. But we’re going to find a new way of being together.”
What stands out about Curry is how she refuses to force her story into a neat arc, or rush through the messier parts. She isn’t interested in “bouncing back” or putting on a brave face for the sake of it. Instead, she’s learning how to present with what it means to begin again - not from scratch, but carrying everything she’s lived through. “It’s like grief,” she tells me. “You have to let go of what won’t come back. And you don’t have to be grateful for the pain to acknowledge what it has made possible.”
“I hope that listeners will take away a sense of someone walking alongside them in their journeys, whatever challenges they are facing. I think that’s always what my music has been good at, it holds your hand and says, ‘You are not alone.’”
Throughout our conversation, we continuously return to conversations around community, and for Curry, it’s not been a concept but more of a lifeline. She tells me about the handwritten postcards she sends out with every vinyl order that comes through, about the poem a fan sent her last week: “I have misplaced my ability to weather storms.” She paused, moved. “That’s how I felt, too.” She shares the story of a stranger who said her music helped them escape a war-torn country. “That’s the point of art, isn’t it?” she says. “To have a real conversation with another human being.”
As we wrap up, I ask her gently what she sees in the future. She shrugs. “I don’t make plans. My health doesn’t allow for it. I’ve lived with a degenerative disease since I was 26. You learn to take things day by day.” Then she smiles, “But for this month? I’d like to write five minutes of music. That’s enough.”
