TJ Douglas – Parts Of You (Team Love Records)
Exclusive listen: Having released album Dying in 2024, written while training as a hospital chaplain, folk singer-songwriter TJ Douglas now releases the beautiful and pertinent single Parts Of You, recorded during the same sessions – have an exclusive listen ahead of release on 7 November 2025 via Team Love Records
Artist: TJ Douglas
Track: Parts of You
Released: 7 November 2025
Label: Team Love Records
Find it: Bandcamp
Formerly performing under Tica Douglas, TJ Douglas is an acclaimed folk singer-songwriter who across an extensive body of work built up over the last decade has become known for being able to find, ‘bounty within tranquility and significance in the mundane’. They’ve captured just that once more on single Parts Of You.
Minimalist in melody with just guitar and voice, all of the focus is on the feeling in this track. It reflects the duality of being present for the dying and those left living, of needing to lose yourself in accompanying the grieving and in doing so of finding more of yourself. It is the beauty and the sadness, the instinct to turn and hide from the reality but the need to stay sharp in the moment. It is a song of solidarity, and which despite the simple arrangement is laden with emotion and the experience.
Of Parts Of You TJ Douglas said, “I wrote Parts of You during my chaplain residency, a year meant to strip you down to your most human self. It came after my first time accompanying a mother who had just lost her child—a loss that rearranged my inner landscape.
“As I wrote it, the song became less about her story and more about my own reckoning: with the parts of myself I’d avoided out of fear, the ones full of grief, anger, tenderness, and memory. That year I learned that facing those parts—befriending them—was the only way to sit honestly with the suffering of others.
“In 2025, as we collectively face our own shadows and the world’s breaking feels closer than ever, Parts of You feels ready to be released. It’s a song about staying with what’s hard, and finding what’s lost in the light.”
‘i’m here to be with you in the dead of the night / to find in the shadows, what is lost in the light’
Parts Of You: ‘the hard mercy of looking inward’
Death is an inevitable part of our existence, and yet navigating it is a hard lesson whether looking at our own grief or quietly sitting by as someone is wrapped in their own. It forces reflection – sometimes on our own mortality but often on our morality too. Far from being the going out of a light death can be the spotlight which makes our shadows impossible to turn away from.
TJ Douglas said, “Parts of You is a song about that reckoning—about the slow, human work of turning toward what hurts, being honest, and discovering that doing this is a liberatory practice – not only for the self, but for the world. I hope this song invites us back to the hard mercy of looking inward, so that our empathy can become something active, rooted, whole, and
justice-seeking.”
With a direct yet gentle style to the vocal the parallel story is told – of the mother in grief, and the introspection which comes from having stood witness to it. While this is, of course, heavy the melody stays light and the lifts upward, and finds the beauty and the liberation of acceptance.
Death as transformation
Like the body of work Parts Of You sprung from (2024’s Dying) there is reflection on the transformative nature of death, both literally and figuratively. Here we get another transformation within the song, where it can be heard as the direct story or if you head under the surface you can hear it as a reflection not only on this experience, and of the learning about the self, but as an allegory for the wider world.
Here the personal becomes the political and implicitly we are encouraged to accept the political is always personal. Even if it feels abstract to us there will be a sharper and very real impact on someone, somewhere. Without needing to set it out directly, repeat listens to Parts Of You lead to the recognition that the incredible empathy needed to be present for the dying and grieving is the sort of empathy we are now in desperate need of in as we navigate the world in our daily life.
TJ Douglas said, “It’s a song about facing our shadows and becoming liberated (self and world). Mostly it’s a song, like all of
mine really, about accompaniment. Sending you accompaniment in the face of all these shadows, and what happens when we refuse to face them honestly – cutting SNAP, stripping the most vulnerable of healthcare, funding wars, kidnapping people off the street, blessing unabashed greed in the face of large-scale suffering.”
Exclusive: Listen to TJ Douglas Parts Of You ahead of release on 7 November 2025
Listen to TJ Douglas Parts Of You on Bandcamp now, with a full release on Friday 7 November 2025 when you will find it on your preferred streaming or download service.
More about TJ Douglas
Debut album Joey arrived from New York folk singer-songwriter TJ Douglas in 2015 and follow up Our Lady Star Of The Sea, Help And Protect us arrived a couple of years later. From this point the album releases reflect experiences of divinity – both in TJ’s theological studies a roles and more broadly around spirituality and inner knowing.
Album Lo was released during the pandemic in 2020 and received amn abbreviated cassette reissue in 2022, before being followed by Dying in 2024. Parts Of You was recorded in the same sessions as Dying, and is a reflection on experiences of training as a hospital chaplain like other songs from this period, but has remained unreleased until now.
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Parts Of You by TJ Douglas is released digitally on 7 November 2025 via Team Love Records. You can pre-save Parts Of You on your preferred service here. Album Dying is out now via Team Love Records and available on vinyl and cassette as well as digitally – find Dying on Bandcamp.
Find TJ Douglas: Bandcamp | Instagram
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Sarah Lay
A long-standing music journalist she's also co-founder of independent record label Reckless Yes, an author of novels, and when not messing around with words and music, a digital strategist.
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