While working on new music after her second album, 2021’s ‘Different Kinds Of Light’, Jade Bird found herself in a “really strange” space. The year before, she had moved from the UK to Austin, Texas with her fiancé during the pandemic, but doubts had started to creep in about where her life was headed. “I was breaking up with my ex sort of subconsciously,” she recalls, “and it was really quite horrific, the relationship.”
After their actual breakup, Bird picked up the pieces and moved once again, this time to Los Angeles, in search of stability and creative spark. “It felt like the time to go, not only creatively but community-wise,” she says. “I was kind of in the middle of this record, and a lot of the producers I wanted to work with were actually in LA. So, I kind of thought, why not just plant myself in the middle to make it all a bit easier?”
In the time since, the Northumberland-born singer-songwriter has rediscovered her joy, found new love, and channeled it all into her new album out today, ‘Who Wants To Talk About Love?’. “I’ve come a lot closer to myself and what I admired about myself at the beginning [of my career],” she says. “And maybe that’s less the move and more breaking up with my fiancé three years ago. I think the culmination of all of them life decisions resulted in me actually getting probably the closest to my true self than I’ve ever been. Creatively and just personally.”
How would you say these experiences have shaped the raw, vulnerable sound of ‘Who Wants To Talk About Love?’?
Jade Bird: “This album tracks this relationship breaking down, but also the relationship with my dad breaking down too. It really is covering a lot of my fears as well as my hopes. For example, ‘Who Wants’, the song that is the title of the album, it’s actually about my parents’ divorce. And it is sort of this larger question about generational trauma and how fated we are to repeat our parents’ mistakes.
“And for ‘Glad You Did’, I was talking to my friend about the literal details of my break-up and feeling a lot of resentment. And then I’m sat by the fire and I’m just picking away, and then the verse is coming and then the chorus is coming. It’s these moments of reflection I was having at the time going through this stuff. It was very much instantaneous and picking it apart at the actual moments of this.
“The whole album was created a bit like that. I felt like in these three or four years, three of those years were me literally in the weeds having probably the worst time of my life and writing through it. And then, the last year or so, I had the ability to be in a good place and look back and kind of see all this stuff and go, ‘OK, how am I gonna glue this together?’ But, in the moment, in the curation, it was a little bit of chaos, I must admit.”
After putting years of work into this new album and going through all this personal upheaval, has it shifted the way you view love and how you answer the question that the album’s title poses?
“I think the biggest thing that’s shifted is, I think, when I was looking for love, I thought that I was supposed to find the opposite of myself. That stemmed from this opinion that I was too much or I was feisty, or I needed the water to the fire.
“And now having fallen in love again, and fallen in love for real this time, I realised that perhaps it’s finding someone who can relate to you and resonate with you – maybe that makes them actually similar to you. For example, my boyfriend [producer Andrew Wells] has got the same birthday as me, and he produced the record, so that kind of says it all.
“You can’t be more understood than by the love of your life, so that allows me a lot more creative freedom and confidence. When I heard ‘Stick Around’ back [when it was completed], I was like, there is nothing else I can do. That was the final stage of where that song was supposed to be. And for someone like me that focuses on the songwriting so much, to get that in the production [side of music creation] is just really sick.”
Would you say this has also changed the way you tackle songwriting now?
“I think that process is actually weirdly similar. I definitely write less. When I was a kid, I sort of believed in the craft and I believed I had to get my 10,000 hours in. And I always had this thing of, ‘I’m not good enough, I’m not good enough.’
“And now, I kind of settle that I put my time in and when I sit down and the emotion’s right, I’ll be able to say what I wanna say. Instead of writing 12 songs – that was in the pandemic, I was trying to write a song a day and I was like, ‘These are real crap.’” [laughs]
When you spoke to us previously, in 2022, you said you were “halfway” through a new album. How much of that has actually stayed on?
“It would probably be… four songs. So, I wasn’t lying! [Laughs]
“‘Avalanche’, ‘Wish You Well’, ‘Save Your Tears’, ‘Dreams’, I think it was those four.”
What about the finished version of ‘Who Wants To Talk About Love?’ has surprised you?
“I’m honestly surprised we got to the finish line because for so long it was like I couldn’t understand how the songs gelled together, I couldn’t understand what the album title was to be. I couldn’t see it as a finished product because I was just so in the darkness.
“And originally I wanted to call it ‘No Flowers’, because I had this mantra to myself that was like, ‘No flowers grow on scorched earth.’ I will never truly grow or I will never find anything fruitful if I don’t forgive and if I keep turning my back on these confrontations and these breakups. It was a bit of a deeper, more poetic album title.
“But then my manager was like, ‘Do you remember that song when you were 16 that you used to sing and break everyone’s hearts?’ And I listened back to it, and then I sort of heard young Jade. It was just this moment of finding her again. This whole album was about finding her again and everything I went through, and that suddenly just felt so much more appropriate.”
Is there a feeling of reconciliation with your younger self then?
“I am definitely still hard on myself and my sort of goal this year especially was to stop living in so much fear. I think that comes from being an artist. You feel so lucky to have this job that you feel it could be taken at any minute. And I’m really tired of living and creating with that pressure. I’m sort of saying to myself before I hit 30 – I’ve got three years – that I wanna just part from that in a more conducive way.”
Speaking of your 30s, what do you think might come out of this nebulous quarter-life crisis period you’re in?
“I think something really awesome. All the artists I truly adore, especially female artists – we’re talking Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette, Mitski, Sharon Van Etten – they were all later on in their career and similar to the age that I’m approaching when they wrote their best work. I’m just so excited to remove myself from that fear, create with this confidence that you can only get with age. Very, very excited for that, even though it is a bit scary.”
In removing yourself from that fear, where do you think the Jade Bird sound is going to develop from here?
“I feel like I’m already working on the album after this one because this one took me so long. I’m heading in a lot more of a folk direction. I am a big, huge fan of Gigi Perez, and I feel like I love that raw sound she’s got with both the vocals and the acoustic and how it’s so front-leaning. And, I think, also it’s interesting ’cause I’m writing this next album sort of about that fear.
“I’m grappling it by the horns and processing it in real time. You know, the fear of being alone, the fear of the love of my life kind of turning around and being like, ‘Oh, actually I’ve decided on something different.’ I’m pouring all of that into the next record.”
With a new album in the works, when do you think you might be teasing or releasing something?
“Oh, really, really soon. I chose to leave the really fiery ones – like the real hard kind of rockers that I feel like maybe I’ve done in the past – off this album ’cause I didn’t want anger included. I’d spent so much of my time with anger. I was just like, ‘We’ll leave that for a moment’. But on the deluxe that I’m gonna put out, I’m bringing ’em all back. Then we’re bouncing straight into the next album. I don’t wanna go away again.”
Jade Bird’s new album ‘Who Wants To Talk About Love?’ is out now via Glassnote Records