Ruins, the first song on Jade Bird’s forthcoming debut album, is a dubious introduction. Her voice is there, with its empathetic, rusty snag, buoyed by acoustic guitar. But then she belts: “I’m not sure who I think I am.” It is not an impression you leave with after an hour with the 21-year-old, nor after hearing her releases so far: rollicking Americana that, over an EP and some singles, has become ever more combustible – see Love Has All Been Done Before, her jubilant riposte to romance’s tired tropes.
She feels a greater kinship with American songwriters such as Gillian Welch and Julien Baker than putative British forebear Jake Bugg, who famously railed against manufactured pop while employing blue-chip songwriters. Bird plays guitar and writes everything. “I didn’t fucking wanna do co-writes,” she shrugs, blasting personality into a sterile meeting room. “I write great songs and the mistakes make them even better. No one else could write a Morrissey song. I don’t want a middle-aged white man telling me how to write my feelings. It’s not gonna work for me.”
Her unshakeable confidence is striking given a potentially destabilising childhood. Her young parents were in the army, taking the family from Northumberland to London and Germany by the time she was five. Her dad was stationed in Bosnia and Kosovo; her mum left the army and cleaned cinemas. Her dad walked out when Bird was seven, so she and her mum moved in with her grandma – whose husband had also left her – in Bridgend in south Wales. That affected Bird more than moving. “My parents split, my grandparents split, and I’m like: ‘Don’t settle too quick, ’cos you might have to pick up your bags and go somewhere else.’”
Her mum was treated poorly by subsequent men, “and that’s hard to watch as a kid,” says Bird, declining to clarify “because I don’t want to be defined by that. People like to associate you with hard times and I pride myself on coming through them more than experiencing them.” That is where music entered, as “the source of escape for these bad feelings”. Bird, 13, took her grandma’s discarded hobby guitar to her and her mum’s new house and spent hours “obsessively trying to get these barre chords down”.
She didn’t discover Americana from her parents’ record collection – they were ardent ravers. Instead, she found the Civil Wars via the fantastically awful country soap Nashville, and started writing and performing at open mic nights in Bridgend. “But you have to get out if you want more,” she says. “And I did.” She was rejected from the Brit school, but dealt with it “like I deal with any rejection: I don’t. I keep whacking my head against the wall.”
On her second attempt, she got in. Leaving Bridgend made sense for everyone: her mum’s new partner also lived in London. Bird started gigging three or four times a week around school. “I was always the sniffly kid with bags under my eyes,” she says. “I was so aware that I’m in London, I’ve got a guitar, I’m nothing special yet and I need to get there, so I just gigged, gigged, gigged.” Just as she was despairing about going undiscovered, begrudgingly contemplating university, a lawyer spotted her. They started meeting managers, most of whom (bar her current one) didn’t get it. Look back on the decade’s tips lists and the primary British guitarists are lads with big attitudes (and increasingly few of them).
“I think the Americana thing was offputting,” says Bird. “I spent a lot of the conversations being like: ‘But why not?’ And they’re like: ‘Because it doesn’t work.’ But that’s a good thing! If it hasn’t been the formula, I wanna create the formula.”
In the end, the US label Glassnote (Phoenix, Chvrches) signed her, pushing her first in the US, where she was lauded by the country industry. She says it felt unrealistic for Radio 1 to play her burnished, bittersweet song Something American, so she waited until it couldn’t ignore her. She is not anti-mainstream success (she wants Radio 1 support “100%”, she says, without blinking, and now has it) and is withering about indie bands that claim to make music for themselves and, if anyone likes it, it’s a bonus. “This was for yourselves, was it?” she says, raising an eyebrow. “Got one hell of a chorus to be for yourselves.”
That tussle between ambition and integrity “really bugged me for a really long time,” she says. “Am I in this to be famous, for followers? And I realised, no, I really want to make something great. Whether it’s my first or my fifth album, I wanna keep giving that a go and almost die trying.” She distinguishes between ego (“the death of music”) and conviction: “It’s important we know the difference between me, ‘I’, and my art form.” Her ambitions are to keep improving, to make art – such as Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting and Patti Smith’s poetry – that defeats streaming-induced passivity.
Her self-titled debut is appropriately bold. Its 12 polished tracks shift between barn-burners, wry acoustic jangle and affecting piano ballads. Her protagonists are often jilting women or foolish men being lured away by (occasionally two-dimensional) temptresses. “With my grandma and mum, the man’s always been the idiot, so that’s why,” she says. She’s not intending to shame anyone. “I love the way you can paint a picture so vividly by incorporating the seedy.”
And yet she is proudest of having written half the songs while being in love – she is in her first happy relationship, with her guitarist. Hence that line in Ruins about not being sure who she is: she always thought unhappiness was integral to songwriting. She is learning that her family’s relationships needn’t define her. “It doesn’t mean that mine will end the same.”
Bird is already thinking about album two, which might reflect her newfound riot grrrl obsession. “You can’t help but feel angry now and I’d love to be able to put that frustration in the music,” she says. But not the lyrics. “I’ve really struggled to do that because it never feels genuine. When everything’s fucked, what do you write about?” She is aware of another political pressure on young, female artists – namely to be a feminist icon, and how easily it can become vapid branding. “I’m not sure how to do anything but what I’m doing because what I’m doing is feminism,” she says. “I’m a young, independent girl and hopefully an example. You don’t need to wear a hashtag T-shirt.”
As a woman, she says: “It’s really interesting to confront the same expectations as white male guitarists and exceed them. That’s my biggest goal, to keep smashing expectations. When people are like, oh, you’re country? Well, here’s an indie rock song. Now it’s punk, and I know what I’m talking about. It’s always been so important for me to be respected over being heralded.” Bird’s tornado of personality, redoubtable conviction and sterling debut suggest the choice won’t be an issue.
