Jade Bird's Transatlantic Songs Of Light

Jade Bird didn't aspire to prepare a nation album. The English-born, Austin-based singer-songwriter known for her big voice and strummy pop-Americana songs wanted to follow up her 2019 self-titled project with a collection that felt true to how trim evolved on tour. She also wanted to maintain her roots. "I'm a British girl," Bird tells MTV News. "I'm into nation, however I didn't think that the songs I was writing were entirely country."


What happened next challenged that notion. At the legendary RCA Studios in Nashville, she booked time with producer Dave Cobb, best known for his Grammy-winning work with Chris Stapleton and Brandi Carlile, and also on the A Star Is Born soundtrack. All things aligned for, yes, a nation album. "And then I get there and slowly find out Dave's been in a Britpop musical group as soon as he was a kid!" Bird says, referencing Cobb's tenure with The Tender Idols in the 1990s. "[Cocteau Twins's] Elizabeth Fraser was referenced, and even Iggy Pop was referenced at one point, although that's not British. Just the most niche, abnormal references to the Bee Gees. My fears were like — there wasn't even a point to them."


The result of Bird and Cobb's colorful teamwork is Different Kinds of Light, Bird's incandescent sophomore album out tomorrow (August 13) that spans the Atlantic: It's a Britpop album cloaked in Americana hallmarks. The combo yields an instantly charming collection that only glows warmer through its 43 minutes. Bird, 23, has embraced the soulful and rootsy elements of Southern American music since her early days, which makes her unabashed embrace of English language melodicism feel like both a return to form plus a bold new direction. It stems from years of globetrotting, the sort of nimbleness she eventually translated into making this alum in just over two weeks.


An army brat, Bird spent her childhood partially in Germany, Wales, and in both northern and southern England. She started writing songs around age 12, and by 14, she was gigging around immediately after school. She eventually recorded a demo in a companions washroom, which landed her a trip to the Catskill Mountain region of New York State, near Woodstock, to riff with Americana talent Simone Felice. Her warm, sparse first EP, 2017's Something American, primarily spotlighted the Southern twang of Bird's singing voice, further honed by sitting in on "very nurturing" Catskills sessions with musicians who’d previously backed up the likes of Jeff Buckley and St. Vincent.


By the time she made her single-stacked debut album two years later, Felice and co-producers intelligently matched the bluster of Bird's voice with bright drums and strummy acoustics high in the mix. The end result turned her vocals into a gale force, enough to blow infectious songs like "Lottery," "Uh Huh," and "Love Has All Been Done Before" into the realm of 42 million combined streams. Nevertheless creating the album felt disjointed, with tracking sessions spread out over each year between tour dates.


"I'd go [record] every six months and I could be a fully different musician, totally different singer," Bird says. "You had this disparity, I think, on that record of me really attempting to work out who I am."


knew she required a more holistic approach for album No. 2. So she went back to the Catskills in early 2020 looking for Felice's barn, where lose written some of these bright singles ("Lottery," "Love Has All Been Done Before") only to find he'd converted also it was no longer usable as a writing space. "I was freaking out because I was like, I need that barn. I need that barn. And he was like, 'No, man, you are a superstitious freak.' And he was totally right," Bird says. She improvised. "I just noticed a cabin down the road and ended up writing some of my preferred tunes."


One of these, "Headstart," set the tone for the new writing sessions by making use of a formula that made Bird's first LP so endearing: building an acoustic runway up to liftoff chorus. (It's included on Different Kinds of Light as a bonus track.) Nevertheless the contradictions are clear: Her voice lies in the middle of the mix, rubbing gently against both the live musical group and the room that housed them. This open sound set the tone for the full recording process, completed partially throughout the pandemic in a series of complex overseas sojourns To the
U.S. That culminated with her totally relocating to Austin last November.


Once sessions started in Nashville, she started "chucking songs" at Cobb, she says, "to the point where we recorded about 10 songs, and Dave was like, 'Hold on a minute. We need to sit down and work out how several bloody songs you've got.'" They spanned the disappearing boys in her life ("Houdini"), a Bonnie and Clyde vision ("1994"), deception and confusion ("Trick Reflect, and loving inspiration right now Is the Time"). All told, Different Kinds of Light boasts over a dozen cuts; to give them their due, Cobb recorded them to emphasize the live-performance elements as much as possible.


"I think to disaster with the mix also much and [make it sound] not a live setting would just be inauthentic because it was so ridiculously live," Bird says. "Every song was pretty much done in two or three takes, which freaked me out because I'm used to hammering every take, like, 20 times."


The added breathing room offered by Cobb permits for some neat advancements. The chorus of right now Is the Time," which centers on sustaining optimism and altruism, finds Bird's vocal in a game of tag with the lead guitar line, played by her partner Luke Prosser, about whom she wrote the song. Quite a couple of songs on the album are about him, she says, and like with Fleetwood Mac's rather personalized Rumours, their closeness gives the songs a "reality." "We've routinely been reliant on each other in a personalized sense, nevertheless in a professional sense, it really gives it some intimacy," Bird says.


"Sometimes, you can't quite connect because you don't know what it's about or you can't quite get it, although it's just so obvious as soon as we play with each other. For me, it's become really key She waits, then smiles. "And any time once he bails on me for a festival gig, I'm very annoyed." Their musical relationship is also on full display on a stunning cover of Radiohead's "Black Star," in the folky arrangement of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, released a couple of months ago.


The Radiohead cover is telling. In 1995, the melodramatic and lovely "Black Star" noticed the musical group embracing Britpop sensibilities even as they started to bend them to their own idiosyncrasies. Likewise, within the past year, homespun Radiohead covers by Hayley Williams, Mxmtoon, Holly Humberstone, and Bird herself have re-centered the kinds of fragile although soaring melodies that first made the genre an indelible force over 25 years back. The refined song structure can be a far cry from the extended jamming that can overtake certain kinds of live acts that revel in the noise.


"I mean, that's what Residents of the
U.S. Do," Bird says. "I was chatting to my booking agent about [Kentucky folk/bluegrass artist] Tyler Childers. He played for four hours. I'm like, oh my God, how long are your songs?" Bird is aware that's not quite her lane. Trim rather be turning Felice's upstate barn — or the lose — into her very own Brill Building, penning melodies soon after melody on an acoustic guitar and marching back to the studio with enough concepts to overwhelm her producer.


"I feel like I write in quite a Beatles-esque way of just verse, chorus, verse, chorus right now. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus right now. There's no messing around," she says, then adds a smile. "Much to my own demise."