Jade Bird announces her new album ‘Different Kinds of Light’ out on August 13th
]In advance of confirming details of the new album, Jade released ‘Headstart’ and ‘Houdini’ at the back end of 2020, followed more recently by the BBC Radio 1 play-listed single ‘Open up the heavens’ and the live EP ‘RCA Studio A Sessions’, taken from her live stream show from the iconic studios earlier this year which once again showcased her natural talent, uncompromising sense of self and enviable musicianship to the world. Jade also recently played a sold out, socially-distanced tour in America and turned in a brilliant performance of ‘Headstart’ for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (HERE).
The RCA studios in Nashville and the North American americana/alt-rock music scene feature heavily in the life cycle of this new album as that’s where Jade majoritively recorded ‘Different Kinds of Light’ with powerhouse producer Dave Cobb (John Prine, Lady Gaga). Over the last 2 years, Jade has organically become part of a community of American songwriters and artists, and the likes of Jason Isbell, Sheryl Crow and Jade’s friend and collaborator, Brandi Carlile have all taken the British voice firmly under their wing.
Jade Bird’s self-titled debut album was received with much critical acclaim when it was released in 2019. Even as a first offering from the then 21 year old, the album helped set the bar for female musicianship in the current age, carried along by Jades mature and sharply observed narrative vignettes of relationships, divorce and everything in between. With this new album, Jade has grown, she’s travelled the world, collected stories, met fascinating new people, fathomed her own emotions and settled in Austin amongst a new and empowering musical family who showed her that a happier, more holistic and sustainable way of working was possible. This journey has helped her see love and relationships in a new light from her teenage self growing up in the UK. It’s been a gateway to self-discovery and an untangling of held onto experience.
On the record Jade says “Different Kinds of Light at its most basic is about falling in love and at its most complex, the chaos of trying to get away from your past. I’ve written about fictional characters, about myself and people who don’t exist or at least only exist in my mind, memory and imagination.
This record started in Japan, a small getaway from a busy year. We took it to Mexico, to Nashville and to upstate New York adding pieces of songs along the way until it became the different phases of who I am, what my relationship is and what my relationship to other people has become.
It’s been a big exploration through evenings and mornings spent under strange skies. With Different Kinds of Light came different kinds of clarity in my life.”
For Jade, it’s always been important to stay connected to the music that she had written (as always), not capitalising on momentum or anyone else’s idea of a career plan. She had a taste of the UK hype cycle, making the BBC’s 2018 Sound Of… poll and being tipped everywhere from Vogue to Rolling Stone. Her debut album arrived a year later. Despite those early garlands, she didn’t become an overnight success. “I was really glad,” she says. “Musically I was not ready. Lyrically I was not ready. And mentally I was not ready.” Nevertheless, ‘Jade Bird’ received plaudits from the likes of Pitchfork and NPR. And it showed Jade, an obsessive at bettering her craft, how she wanted to build on the foundations she had laid.
If her debut reflected on “literally every male family member being absent, present, absent, present”, she says, ‘Different Kinds of Light’ reflects on what it means to stay, to love, to allow yourself to be loved. It’s about “being with somebody who you adore more than the whole world that hasn’t got the foundations to believe in themselves,” she says. “Hasn’t had people supporting them in a way that their potential can be realised, ‘cause they’ve been crippled by the people or environments that surround them.”
Jade translated these conflicted emotional states into sharply observed narrative vignettes that show her flair as a storyteller: the guy oblivious to what’s in front of him, the escape artist who confesses to being “asleep at the wheel my whole damn life”; the wastrel burning through their promise. “If I had a penny for all your potential, I’d be left drowning in my mouthful of metal,” Jade sings on Now Is the Time. It speaks to how quickly her writing has matured from the more polemical storytelling of her debut. “When you’re young, you sit in a chaos of emotions and desperately try to write out of it,” says Jade, who’s still only 23. “But when you’re older, you work out what’s affected you and why more clearly. It’s amazing what two years can do: it’s like you’re writing as you’re watching instead of writing to see.”
In the studio with Dave Cobb, the two let Jade’s sound find its groove, joining tough 90s alt-rock and the melodicism of Blur and Oasis at their sweetest to the taut rattle of Iggy Pop’s The Passenger. “That rock element that I’ve been missing and deeply love,” is how Jade describes it. “If I’m in the car, that’s what I put on.” There’s also the spirit of Fleetwood Mac’s pop epics. Stevie Nicks’ Storms inspired ‘Different Kinds of Light’s’ title track, written in summer 2019 while Jade toured the US with Jason Isbell and Father John Misty. “It says so much: ‘did not deal with the road’, ‘I have always been a storm’. There’s so much in that record that breaks my whole being,” she says, melting.
Any trepidation Jade might have felt about her profession on her debut album has now dissipated. “I never felt like I could call myself an artist – like, we’ll see. Whereas I know that’s my occupation now. That’s who I am, and that’s incredibly reassuring.”
Jade Bird remains one of the UK’s most individual and exciting female voices out there. With ‘Different Kinds of Light’ we find her cool, calm and collected – confidently striding ahead into her sure-to-be enthralling next chapter of her life and music.
‘Different Kinds of Light’ – out August 13th on Glassnote Records – Pre-order HERE
Tracklisting:
- DKOL
- Open up the heavens
- Honeymoon
- Punchline
- Different Kinds Of Light
- Trick Mirror
- I’m Getting Lost
- Houdini
- 1994
- Now is the Time
- Candidate
- Red White and Blue
- Rely On
- Prototype
