Birdy’s Young Heart pulses with a familiar sorrow. Battered and bruised, the towering 16-track record, her first in five years, carries a faint whisper of Joni Mitchell’s transcendent Blue. Birdy picks her way through her heart’s ruin, clinging to misery and tears as a way to cope, before ultimately discarding it altogether and emerging with fresh new skin.
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Birdy swaps out her usual alt-pop theatrics for something earthier and more enchanting, as if she’s the Greek earth god Gaia sent here to replenish the soil and its waters. “The Witching Hour” primes the listener for a celestial, out-of-body experience, pieced together with piano and bird calls, leading into the sea-faring “Voyager.” The record, produced with Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, the duo behind Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour, spends much of its emotional currency not only on Birdy’s heartache but universal themes of fate, recovery, and redemption.
“I’m not hugely religious, but I do believe in something. Especially when I’m writing, I feel very connected to something. This album is talking to that force, whatever it is, and asking questions,” Birdy tells American Songwriter over a recent Zoom call. From owning, and even celebrating, her loneliness to untangling unseen threads (“Lighthouse”), the singer-songwriter seems to unlock answers to swelling existential inquiries─or she’s learned to accept many questions that just don’t have answers.
“I was so relieved to finish the album,” she adds. “For a long time, I didn’t know whether I would. I had such a bad writer’s block at the beginning, and I just couldn’t get over it for such a long time. To actually finish it was the end of that journey.”
Birdy collected scraps and fragments of songs, but “it was quite hard to finish them,” she says. In the throes of songwriting, she packed a bag and headed to India with her sister and cousin, hoping a change of scenery would be the charge she desperately needed. “I needed a break and not think about it for a while,” she continues. So, they headed off to Goa, a coastal state lining the Arabian Sea. “It was so amazing, but it was completely deserted. It was out of season when we were there. That made it better in a way. There was this beautiful landscape just really empty. The sky is so beautiful there. The imagery and feeling very small in this incredible country filtered into some of the songs.”
Such a personal turning point coincided with a moment of musical enlightenment. Birdy had been listening to mostly Etta James and Nina Simone, soulful touch-points that can be heard on songs like the title cut, when she revisited Mitchell’s landmark record Blue. “Everything changed after that. I saw the soul and the Laurel Canyon feel coming together. That record hadn’t really clicked for me in the past. Then suddenly, going through a heartbreak and getting a bit older locked it into place.
“She writes about the mundane things, but it’s mixed with these big perspectives. That’s what makes it really special. I never really tried to write that way,” she continues, noting the conversational style seeping into her own work. “It’s like she’s talking to a friend. The music on this album is sort of me at the piano, like how I sing when I’m alone and singing to myself. I wanted the words to feel that way, as well. Even writing, there was a lot of conflict involved about whether I’ve made the right decisions. There were definitely times I questioned, but I don’t think it could have been any other way.”
Birdy’s vocal performances even witnessed a seismic shift. “On the last record, singing felt a bit like a performance to me. I find sometimes when I perform onstage, I almost put on this voice. Actually, when I just play by myself on a piano, it’s very different. It’s a lot softer. I wanted to capture that, and it felt very real and raw. That’s not something I’ve been able to achieve before. As soon as I know I’m recording, I’ve changed my approach and didn’t mean to. It was quite a struggle.”
“Surrender,” a moment of earnest pleading, bulldozes the senses, a vocal purity with a visceral edge. Sometimes I try so hard to fight / When all I want to do is fall into the night… into your arms, she sings, weariness lacing the air. Birdy seizes such yearning in song as a probing mechanism, a vital stepping stone in her ongoing personal journey. “Surrender to me is almost wanting to give up sometimes and revert to a place that’s more comfortable,” she explains. “It’s asking whether it’s all going to be for a reason. It was a bit of a struggle at some points making the album. I couldn’t quite capture the initial feeling on the demo. It took a few tries to get that one feeling right.”
A stripped piano ballad, “Nobody Knows Me Like You Do” captures the beauty in simplicity, barreling through Birdy’s most plainspoken, yet still poetic, imagery. Last night, your eyes were bright again like when we first met / Tried to hide it, but I knew right then you’d found somebody else, she sings, her voice cracking around the edges. Initially, the song possessed a full-bodied production style, but during a recording trip to Nashville, the song tugged her into another direction.
“I tried so many takes of it in Nashville. It’s so personal and I needed to be back where I wrote it,” she says, remarking it was finished in her bedroom apartment with her brother. “In my head, it was seeing someone again after a long time and how you can see them and it feels like nothing’s changed at all.”
Moments later, Birdy swings for the silver screen with “River Song,” stretched with delicate, grand stringwork. Seen centuries come and go, is the future like the past? Do we shine a temporary glow, or are we built to last? she ponders on the second verse. A mystique buried in its center, the cinematic centerpiece sprouts from “the idea of this huge river that’s been around for centuries and lots of people come and tell their secrets and stories to this river. This song is me talking to the river and asking it to share some of its wisdom.”
It’s a moment of refreshment, calling the listener to turn a tender ear in her direction. Later, Birdy gives a reprieve from the journey with “Chopin Waltz in A Minor,” an interlude harkening to her youth when her mother first taught her the classic piano piece. “It’s something I play as almost a little tick. I just do it all the time when we’re recording. Ian and Daniel had just been recording in between takes for another song. It’s nice to show my classical roots. It takes you out of the feeling of the album for a second.”
Where “The Witching Hour,” the opening interlude, rises as a magical invitation, a reference to that bedeviling 4 a.m. hour which has brought Birdy plenty of creativity, “Celestial Dancers” tips its hat to India with playful pitter-patter. Written with James Ford and Foy Vance, the five-minute epic trickles with a deep-chested moodiness. Here we are just floating with the moon and stars / Just waiting for something, a little spark, she breathes into the night sky.
With “New Moon,” Birdy continues gentle rhythmic prancing, trading in an acoustic guitar to do most of the heavy lifting. Tomorrow I’ll know why I’ve been feeling so strange / I’ll know all of the answers to the things I can’t explain, she sings. Written during the last stages of recording the album, literally “the week before,” she offers, the acoustic romper lifts the foot off the emotional pedal, allowing for Birdy to heave a final breath. “It’s the last stage, and it’s looking to the future. I wasn’t going to put it on the album, actually, since it was written so late. I felt it was nice to have a bit of that lightness.”
Birdy’s Young Heart is an inherently intuitive collection, and it seems fitting it arrives as she celebrates 10 years since the release of her eponymous debut record. Birdy, released late 2011, features a cover of Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love,” which became a viral sensation and set the bright-eyed songwriter on a meteoric rise to fame. “I can’t believe it’s been 10 years. It’s gone by so fast. I feel really grateful to have as much experience as I do at my age. It all goes into a bit of a blur with the touring. It’s hard to keep track and remember all the things I’ve done. I’ve traveled so many places. It’s been an amazing 10 years. I’ve learned to listen to my intuition a lot more.”
