It's hard to write about these things, but it makes it more important, I think. “I find it very hard to write when in the moment of that feeling I need a bit of time for it to settle and for my head to be clear. “This is why it ended up taking so long, because I just wasn't ready to write about it for a long time,” she admits. By the time I finished the songs, it was quite hard to then record them and let them go I had been holding on to them for so long.”įraming her more recent writing process against her prolific releases during her teen years, Birdy was stumped when she developed a case of writer’s block: It was a harder album to write, but it's definitely more personal and it means a lot more to me than anything I've done before. I needed to learn who I was a bit, and so a lot of it is about that conflict. At the beginning of writing it I was in a relationship that ended, so the whole album is about being at that crossroad and still loving this person, but feeling compelled to leave and to be on my own. “It’s definitely my favourite album, but emotionally it was quite hard because it is a heartbreak album. I'm kind of desperate for it to come out!” she laughs. I think it's only now that I can really take it in properly.”Īdmitting that Young Heart hasn’t been an easy album to make, after five years away she’s nothing but excited for it to be unleashed on the world in April, saying it’s the most true to who she is: I’d be touring and I would hear the songs on the radio for the first time. It's just so weird thinking of all the things I did because at the time I was so young I kind of didn't really know what was happening a lot of the time! It was just really exciting. “It feels like another life almost, because so much stuff was all packed into six or seven years,” she recalls. Two further hugely successful albums followed before she was 20, which she admits feels quite strange to reflect on. Her self-titled debut album, Birdy, followed that year to similar success, peaking at number one in Australia, Belgium and the Netherlands. I ended up redoing a few bits in a little makeshift studio in a cupboard at my grandpa's cottage where I was staying, so it was quite interesting,” she says brightly.īursting onto the scene in 2011, her debut single – a cover version of Bon Iver's Skinny Love – charted across Europe and earned platinum certification six times in Australia. “We had finished everything, but then gave us time to reflect and listen to it all. Catching her in between studio sessions in West London, she admits that the last year has been a strange one, but that she managed to finish off the new album just before the pandemic hit. Somehow, she is exactly how I expected her to sound on the phone: well spoken (she’s got the kind of British accent that makes Americans swoon), polite and introspective – Birdy is a deep thinker through and through. Reflecting on Birdy’s many achievements, (discovered at the age of just 12 years old, she has amassed over 1.6 billion streams worldwide, 1 billion YouTube views, 7.1 million monthly Spotify listeners and boasts 4.7 million album sales to date, not to mention she has written songs for The Hunger Games, Disney Pixar’s Brave, The Fault in Our Stars and The Edge of Seventeen), it’s easy to forget that she is only 24 years old. Soon the world will be able to hear the results in her upcoming album, Young Heart. Home to the greatest heartache songs ever written, visiting Nashville had a profound effect on the Lymington-born singer, and drawing from artists like Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake, she became consumed with the idea of the tussle between the vastness of space and the interior of home, and the conflict between wanting to hide away and feeling compelled to leave. She reveals why creating a heartbreak record has been her most difficult but rewarding project yet, and how she has made loneliness her ally.Ī five year gap between albums may sound like a long interval, but for Birdy, taking time to stop, experience the world and find out who she really is was a necessary circuit break. With her fourth studio album, Young Heart, Birdy has crafted her most personal body of work to date. It’s been five years since the release of her last album, so Birdy wasn't going to let a touch of writer's block stop her from creating her most personal record yet.