Del Water Gap – I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet

By: Enya Xiang

I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet cycles through the tentative stages of new romance and its looming end, simultaneously a love letter and breakup album. The two-pronged title alludes to this contradiction, except this isn’t Del Water Gap in his own words. 

S. Holden Jaffe, the creative mind and producer behind Del Water Gap, found a love note from his late grandfather to his 98-year-old grandmother on a page of a poem, ‘This Is Just to Say’, by William Carlos Williams. “It says, ‘Dear Pat’, and underneath it says, ‘Love, David. I miss you already, and I haven’t left yet’”, according to Jaffe.

Jaffe’s pop-rock sophomore album is a tumbling windstorm of regrets, intrusive thoughts, yearning, and soul-searching. A singular female figure emerges in Del Water Gap’s confessions within I Miss You Already. Sometimes Holden refers to her directly, sometimes in the third person. Whoever “she” may be—one person or multiple—, the album reveals the ways that romantic relationships shape and shake our understanding of ourselves. These memories reverberate with melancholy lows and reach triumphant heights. 

From the first moment you meet these individuals to its bitter end, you are transformed forever. In this way, the beginning and end are indistinguishable.

I Miss You Already begins with the wistful ‘All We Ever Do Is Talk’, as Jaffe addresses a former lover, reflecting on an intense friendship and romance, and asks, “What did we lose?” The album begins with the end and acknowledges longingly that this fated relationship has left a deep indent. Del Water Gap’s voice yearns, hoping for it all to start again, “But will we ever get that feeling again?”

‘Losing You’ remembers a moment of strife and creeping despair as a relationship comes to a close. “I wrote this song literally minutes after walking away from a fight with a person I was seeing at the time”, Jaffe explains in an interview with Clash. Pained with regret, his voice soars over the grinding dissonance of electric guitar, “I know I should learn to shut my mouth”. 

‘NFU’, with its bright synths and airy vocals, propels us to after the breakup. Del Water Gap spills with a gravity found in heroic epics, “I’m afraid that I’ll die without you”. Love alters worlds, and its demise is just as destructive as Jaffe unravels with it.

 The second half of I Miss You Already circles back to the relationship’s early stages. In these tracks, the female partner emerges when Jaffe reflects on his journey as an artist, trying to find meaning in his work. She evolved into a reflection of his self-image.

The deceptively upbeat ‘Coping on Unemployment’ reveals the difficulties of building a relationship while growing as an individual. Jaffe recalls a conversation with his lover, who does not spare his feelings: “I think your music got worse since you went fully sober / At least now you won’t kill yourself”. The price of artistic evolution is surrendering—“giving yourself over to something”—often to the brink of self-destruction.

Del Water Gap expresses the darker, obsessive nature of romance with vivid imagery and sharp dialogue. In ‘Beach House’, he steeps the color red with emotional meaning: “I cut my tongue sucking on a toothache / Red wine and a plate of veal”. In the slow, sultry ‘Glitter & Honey’, “she” returns and asks Del Water Gap, “Do you want to sweat with me to The Beatles?” When Jaffe murmurs, “We could give it a try”, we know that this is the moment when it all begins.

 In ‘Want It All’, Del Water Gap searches for his sense of self, tumbling between heartbreak and new romance. He debates between wanting it all (“I want it all”) and wanting nothing at all (“No, I want nothing at all”). He sees, or imagines, an owl outside his room, a sign for change to come. The finale, ‘We Will Never Be Like Anybody Else’, reels gently back to the ending relationship. The female figure also returns to offer, “You don’t have to keep me if I give you hell”. Jaffe’s voice cracks, full of lost possibilities, but he knows that he must start anew.

The title, I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet, is not the only piece of writing that Jaffe has repurposed. The words, Del Water Gap, were written on the back of a white box truck, which he noticed while driving, speaking to the carefree way that Jaffe processes his experiences, exploring his transformation as an individual and artist in an imaginative way. While the album may feel like eavesdropping on delicate conversations and raw declarations, Del Water Gap has knowingly embraced you in.