There’s a purgatory nobody warns you about. You’re free on paper, technically unattached, not waiting by the phone because that chapter already died on its own. But you’re still in it. Still running the mental tape. Still catching yourself mid-thought about someone who made it very clear they’re not coming. I lived in that space longer than I’ll admit out loud, long enough that I started calling it normal. Half-love is a slow poison. One person is all the way in, the other is a ghost in a nice sweater, and the imbalance warps you before you notice it happening. Then one day you walk out the other side and realize you’ve been the only one building anything this whole time. The freedom is disorienting. The serotonin is so fucking real. Jaclyn Bradley wrote a song about that walk and she called it ‘Chicago.’
The production is haunting and restrained. Low tempo, spare, an ambient drift that puts your thoughts on a long leash. Nothing competes with Jaclyn’s voice and the arrangement knows it. There’s a melancholy shimmer to the whole track – alt-pop that doesn’t demand your attention so much as quietly command it. The production gives her voice room to carry the grief and the relief at the same time, and she does.
She opens with “I run through Chicago where did my head go / I’m still feeling serotonin” and drops you into that body-before-brain state immediately. You know the one. You do something brave and the nervous system floods before your thoughts can even form sentences. She’s running. She’s lit up. She’s already somewhere her mind hasn’t arrived yet.
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Then she gets honest in a way that might sting: “maybe I need therapy / cause I can’t find the sympathy / that you are now asking of me / it’s been quiet since I left the City.” She’s not apologizing for what she doesn’t feel anymore. The sympathy he wants? She looked for it and it’s gone. The quiet since leaving is telling too. Some absences are a relief and she’s not pretending otherwise. That’s some real shit and she delivers it with zero drama.
“I’m still feeling serotonin I don’t notice / all of your half truths, painted in blue” is where the freedom becomes armor. She’s riding so high she can see the half-truths clearly and they don’t even slow her down. Half truths painted in blue, that image is doing real work. Blue is sad, soft, designed to make you forgive the person who told them. She sees the color now.
The metaphor she reaches for next stopped me cold: “things change, I get that / love is honey and I get stuck in it / all the lights that I think I see / fade just like a 14th century painting.” Love is honey and she got stuck in it, which is one of the more goddamn honest things anyone has said about why we stay. The image of ancient paint fading, all those lights dimming over centuries, nothing preserved forever. She understands impermanence and she’s made her peace with it.
“I need peace / and parked car driveway thinking / I’m counting days til next week / I probably need to sleep” is painfully real. The parked car driveway ritual where you sit in your own driveway because you need a few more minutes before you go inside. That lonesome-ass ritual of counting down to something, anything. She’s not broken. She’s just running on empty after a long time of carrying something heavy.
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And then she lands it: “you made me feel like it was real life / you made me feel like it was real.” Past tense and she knows it. Everything she built around this person was scaffolding around a fiction and she can see it from enough distance to say so calmly. The repetition of “real” is quiet grief for something she believed completely. The stillness of that line is what cuts.
Jaclyn Bradley has lived several careers’ worth of life. An opera-trained singer-songwriter from Lorain, Ohio, she moved to New York City ten days before 9/11 and picked up her guitar in the aftermath. She’s since recorded on both coasts, appeared on The Voice of Holland, Ireland’s Got Talent, backed Ty Stone, sang alongside Terri Nunn of Berlin, and led what was reportedly the largest music therapy study in history, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. She founded Rock Town Music Academy in 2020. Her single ‘Hometown’ is in the 2025 film ‘Beneath the Light’ and she recently opened for Deana Carter. This is not a woman who stayed still when things got hard.
She describes ‘Chicago’ as “a memory of the day that set me free.” She flew to the city to reunite with a boy from her past, someone who played Hamlet in a summer theater from a younger chapter of her life. The romance burned fast. But something else caught fire on the walk home. She spent eight hours alone in that city and wrote about feeling “high on the promise of new beginnings,” shedding years of what she calls “fear, doubt and misery.” She had left her marriage. She was stepping into a freer version of herself she’d been fighting toward. And then she says the thing that gets me: she didn’t drown like Ophelia. She flew. That’s the whole damn song in four words and she’s lived enough to mean every one of them.
That purgatory I mentioned? It ended on a nothing day. No ceremony, no revelatory conversation over drinks. I just woke up and the mental tape wasn’t running. The ghost in the nice sweater had finally vacated. ‘Chicago’ is the sound of that morning, after you stop orbiting something that stopped being real. Jaclyn walked eight hours through a city and came out the other side of herself. Every step of it earned.
