DAMEDAME*'S DREAMS ON THE PASSENGER SEATS ABOUT TAKING YOUR LIFE BACK

There is something powerful about the title DREAMS ON THE PASSENGER SEAT.

Your dreams are still coming with you.

They have disappeared. But they are not driving the car either.

That is what this album feels like. Two women trying to work out what has been controlling the direction of their lives. Is it love? Fear? Family? Security? Ambition? Other people’s expectations? Or their own lack of belief?

DAMEDAME* are a Brummie duo, Barbara Bono and Edith Nelson (PRODUCERS, WRITERS AND VOCALISTS HELLO). They have already worked behind the scenes with artists including Jorja Smith, Tems and Wizkid, but this album allows them to place their own lives at he centre.

One thing about me, I will always listen for what an album is saying beneath the hook. I want to know what the artist is avoiding, what they are admitting and what they are still trying to understand.

This album gives you ALL THREE.

It moves through home, freedom, love, loneliness, faith, imposter syndrome and the cost of change your purpose. It begins with the need to feel safe and ends with the realisation that surviving everything does not automatically mean you know how to love yourself.

This is not your typical heartbreak album BUT it is an album about returning to YOURSELF.

LET’S TALK ABOUT IT

See that track guys. It questions what home really means. Familiarity can feel like safety, even when it is also hurting you. I love home and family, but I have learned that you NEED to become a safe place for yourself too.

Freedom understands that liberation comes with a cost. Sometimes you have to disappoint people who benefited from the version of you with no boundaries. You can leave a room physically and still carry its opinions in your head.

Stranger captures the tension between wanting love and wanting to run from it. You ca pray for partnership while still having habits built around survival. Healing helps you recognise whether you are leaving because something wrong, or because something real requires vulnerability.

Language is way lighter, but the message still matters. Chemistry can introduce two people, but communication decides whether they can build anything. I do not want to translate mixed signals into commitment.

Promise asks whether words will ever become consistent behaviour. I need someone who respects the parts of me that are still becoming. Promise without patterns mean nothing.

All of my life explore what happens when you send years becoming what between growth and shape-shifting. God did not create me to send my life auditioning for acceptance.

Buried in the sand finally stops negotiating. I would rather experience the temporary loneliness of saving than remain somewhere I already feel alone. Sometimes closure is simply deciding you have seen enough.

SMS Takes the sadness that could not be communicated to another person and gives it to God.Faith is not pretending you never feel low. It is knowing where to take the feeling.

Luv myself reaches the lesson underneath the whole album.Love should not reuse you to disappear. Missing someone does not mean they belong in your life and love can be real without being right.

Fire burnin’ thru the rain returns to the dream. Success can arrive while you are still healing from what it took to reach it. Strength is not pretending nothing hurt you. It is refusing to let the hurt become the final description of your life

By the end, the album ask when you stop placing your life in somebody else’s hands and return to the driver’s seat.

You can want freedom and still miss what trapped you. You can love someone and still leave. You can believe in God and still struggle. You can be living inside an answered prayer while asking God to help you carry it.

Your dreams can sit beside you for a while.

Eventually, you have to driveeeee

BARSSS..

BUT LISTEN TO THE ALBUM