A Chamber Pop Reintroduction Rooted In Healing, Nature, And Hard-Won Grace
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Cari Burdett has always carried a voice that seems to arrive with its own weather. On Where Is Love
, that voice returns after a long silence, warm and dusky, moving through the song like a lantern held up at dusk. The B.C.-based singer-songwriter has spent years away from the recording spotlight, and this single feels like the first open window after a season of closed doors. It’s graceful, patient, and quietly moving, with a pop-soul pulse that nods to classic songcraft while leaving plenty of room for Burdett’s own curious, border-crossing instincts.
Where Is Love
is the kind of song that sounds immediately familiar without feeling predictable. Robbie Grunwald’s production gives it a soft-focus glow: piano lines that ripple rather than rush, a rhythm section that keeps the floor steady, and chamber pop flourishes that lift the track without crowding it. The arrangement has the poise of a room full of good players listening closely to one another. Subtle instrumental details bloom around Burdett’s mezzo-soprano, which remains the centre of gravity throughout. She doesn’t oversing. She lets the phrasing breathe, and that restraint makes the emotional weight land harder.
There’s a real sense of arrival here, but also of return. Burdett’s new album, Don’t Forget, is her first collection of self-penned songs, and that shift matters. After years of interpreting the work of Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Edith Piaf, and other towering voices on Magnolia, she steps forward with material that sounds deeply lived-in. The songs were shaped before a vocal injury forced her into an extended period of healing, and that backstory gives the project a particular kind of gravity. You can hear the distance she’s travelled in the way the song leans into longing without collapsing under it.
Burdett has described the album as a map back to herself, and Where Is Love
captures that search in miniature. It asks a simple question, but the answer is anything but simple. Love appears here as something elemental and communal: in friendship, in grief, in the natural world, in the people who steady us when life tilts. That emotional breadth suits Burdett’s artistic identity, which has always moved fluidly between performance, education, and community work. She brings that same relational sensibility to her music, where intimacy never feels manufactured.
There’s also a strong cultural pull in the way Burdett works across genres and traditions. Her music has long carried traces of art song, jazz, opera, and folk, but on Where Is Love
those influences settle into a sound that feels especially centred. It’s adult contemporary in the best sense: mature without being stiff, elegant without losing its pulse. The song doesn’t chase drama. It finds it in the small, human places, in the ache of not knowing, in the hope that keeps showing up anyway.
With upcoming album Don’t Forget as the full return, Where Is Love
is the doorway. And it opens onto something luminous.
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