Speaking to Jade Bird for even just a few minutes, two things become immediately apparent: Songwriting is paramount to her artistic practice, and she’s got a keenly self-aware, razor-sharp sense of humor (largely made evident in her frequent, self-deprecating asides). “I can’t emphasize enough how much of a writer I am,” the London-based, 21-year-old artist tells me before her recent U.S. tour. She doesn’t precisely have to spell this out—the five songs on her debut EP from last year, Something American, did that for her. “My focus on everything is songwriting, so I write all of my stuff by myself. In this kind of climate, it’s actually a bit of a rarity,” Bird says. She writes at least one song each day.
Bird was born in the North of England, but she moved around a lot as a kid because her father was in the army—she’s lived in Germany, Wales, and then in London, where she’s still based at the moment, although she’s hoping to move to Los Angeles at some point in the near future. Her parents were primarily interested in dance music, so it wasn’t until a family friend showed her some old folk classics (Neil Young; Crosby, Stills & Nash; Bob Dylan; and Joni Mitchell) that her ear for the American folk tradition developed. She picked up the guitar herself in the wake of an especially tumultuous time—her parents had just split up, she had moved to Wales with her grandmother and her mom. “I needed a vent, so I think that’s ultimately why I got into music so heavily, because of these transitions, so to speak,” she says.
Bird’s latest work, including her newly released single, “Love Has All Been Done Before,” finds the young artist brightening up her sound and taking influence from the punkish stylings of Alanis Morissette and Patti Smith. “It’s more optimistic, I think,” Bird says of these new songs, which will round out her upcoming debut LP (anticipated arrival, early 2019). “It’s a lot more ballsy.”
This new single in particular encapsulates the themes of this album, Bird says. “It’s the idea of being a 21-year-old and being faced with the fact that no matter what you do, the fate of your relationship is more likely than not going to end in the same way so many others have,” she says. “No one ever wants to be the girl that got her relationship wrong again, but if you let your cynicism take over you risk never falling in love.” Stay tuned for more from the young singer-songwriter in the near future.