She’s smiling now but, back then, it was a different story.
“I went there with and played it to him, but it was in the middle of the heartbreak so it was the worst timing,” she recalls. The heartbreak she was going through at the time had other plans. She met up in the studio with renowned producer Ethan Johns (Kings Of Leon, Laura Marling) with a vision of making the whole record with him. The key word here is potential: for someone too young to be served at the venue's bar, Birdy has an indecent amount of it.When Birdy began work on her fourth album ‘ Young Heart’, she envisaged things being fairly straightforward. No Angel, a porcelain-fragile duet with her cellist, felt like a lost Stina Nordenstam track. She hasn't quite found her own voice: on the vaguely Celtic-sounding Words as Weapons, she was pretty much Dolores O'Riordan turned down to two, and her tender, confessional tone on the National's Terrible Love conjured up Laura Nyro.
Strange Birds, from the current Fire Within album, started the evening on a fragile, balladic note from which it rarely deviated.
Birdy is still too green to feel comfortable in front of a crowd, and spent most of the set tucked behind the keyboard. Here, it also offered a barrier between her and the audience. Her main instrument is the piano, the fallback for many a mournful songwriter. Fuelled by a teenager's magnified emotions – most of her new songs rage with infatuation and jealousy – she attacks every note with trembling vehemence. A sort of reverent whoosh greeted her entrance – all the more remarkable, given that the average punter was at least a decade older than the now 17-year-old singer. Ninety minutes before her set, the queue stretched along the side of the Forum once inside, people didn't move from whatever scrap of floor-space they'd bagged. It reached the top 10 in September, but it's necessary to see her play live to appreciate the chord that she's struck. That self-titled 2011 debut album sold a million copies worldwide, setting up Birdy – formerly known as Jasmine van den Bogaerde – for a second record, this time featuring her own material.
0 kommentar(er)
