Didn't She Do Dwell : an interview with Wallis Bird

It’s been a long if not quite strange trip for Wallis Bird over the past decade or so. From the small village in County Wexford where she grew up to Berlin, via Dublin and London, the once wandering singer-songwriter-musician has finally found a place she’s happy to call home. The German capital is where she lays her hat these days and she says couldn’t be happier.

“Oh yeah, Berlin is utopia for me,” she beams, sitting in a Dublin hotel on a brief Irish visit. “I moved to the Neukölln part of the city about five years ago; it was dirty and gritty and I loved everything about it. It’s changed a bit, become more gentrified, but it’s still brilliant.”

Her fifth album, appropriately-titled Home, is an ode to this newfound domestic bliss and contentment. Dedicated to her partner and muse who she met in Berlin several years ago, it’s a blend of her own words and unique voice, with both electronic and organic textures. Indeed, it encompasses the myriad of styles and genres the artist has traversed since the release of her 2006 debut single, ‘Blossoms In The Street’.

However, the album was initially borne not out of happiness, but of Bird’s near exhaustion and burnout from relentless touring and recording.

“Being on the road was doing my head in but I didn’t realise it,” she reflects. “I didn’t see it coming at all but I was lucky enough that my management said to me, ‘You need a break.’ So they wiped my calendar clean for a year. I honestly didn’t think I needed it, and I would have kept things going. With me it’s like, ‘Put me on the road as much as possible because I love it and I can’t get enough of it.’ But my managers know me inside out and they said, ‘Stop right now – get this new apartment and write the album you want to write.’”

Bird did just that, spending almost two years creating the sounds and songs that make up Home – the process helped by her new working environment.

“I couldn’t work in my old apartment because my neighbour really hated me,” she recalls. “It wasn’t because I was loud or anything, she was just a really mean spirited person and I got really paranoid anytime I’d be playing or singing there. Now in the new place it’s great – one of the neighbours said to me, ‘Was that you I heard singing yesterday?’ I said, ‘Yeah it was. Sorry – was I too loud?’ She said, ‘No, not at all, but could you sing a bit louder the next time please? I just thought, ‘Yes!’”

The recording process was, she says, structured and intense with a strict routine involved. “I treated it very much like something that needed a lot of time spent on it. So I took twenty months off, didn’t gig, didn’t leave the flat much. I’d set up a home studio and I woke up everyday and said, ‘Right – let’s go to work.’ The motivation was simply to stay motivated and to be happy. It was a fucking breeze in the end.”

The first words on the first track of the album, ‘Change’, serve as a declaration of the overall theme: “I’ve waited all my life for this… what will be will always come.” Elsewhere, the middle-eastern sounding ‘Love’ builds intricate layers of chanting voices and sounds.

“I’m always fucking layering things,” laughs Bird. “Jesus, it’s ridiculous. The first couple of months I spent doodling, enjoying new instruments and playing the piano, just kind of broadening my musical horizons. Once I was into something and it felt right, I’d lay it down. Then I’d go to something else and come back to the previous piece. That process could take a couple of months. There were multiple ideas, blending into other ideas, and then I pared them back. I painted a picture of my life with all the flavourings of my previous records.”

The title track, an a cappella tune, stands out among the dense instrumentation, and it’s the song that Bird references most.

“It’s a sean-nos song, real fucking traditional stuff,” she notes. “It’s a straight up story of how I met my girlfriend. The lyrics mention exactly where it happened and the feeling I had at the time. I recorded it in the kitchen in the exact spot where I first laid eyes on her. We met at a house party and then we moved into that house, three years ago. In the background there’s audio of the first night we met, when we were all sitting around having the craic. You can actually here a voice saying, ‘I’m so glad I met you.’ She’s from Kerry. I love Kerry people – they’re so calm and cool and in touch with nature.”

The singer reflects on her own early years, when she made the decision to leave school. In doing so, she broke out from her home village in Wexford, just outside of Enniscorthy.

“I was green behind the ears,” says Bird, “but I’m the sixth child of seven, and I got away with murder with my parents. At the same time, I was blessed in that they never pressured me into anything. I got into the Music College in Ballyfermot and after that I said, ‘I’m moving to Germany’, just on a whim after I met some nice people and got a scholarship there. There was a lot of crying at the time – they worried if I’d be okay.

“But then not long after I moved over, I went from zero to a hundred. I’d gotten on this big TV show and I had 700 people coming to my gigs. My parents came over to one of the shows, met my management and for the first time they thought, ‘Okay – she’s going to be fine.’”

Success came quickly with Bird’s debut single, ‘Blossoms In The Street’, spending twenty weeks in the German airplay charts. Scoring a deal with Island Records, she then moved to London, releasing her debut album, Spoons, in 2008. The follow-up, New Boots, earned the singer a Meteor Award, a feat replicated by her self-titled 2012 album. The same year, she returned to Germany.

“I had very high standards for myself in terms of what I wanted,” says Bird. “When it wasn’t working out for me here, I moved on. I met a few managers who were quite fickle, but then I was quite fickle too. When I signed my first record deal it was all, ‘We’ll dress you this way, and make you sound this way.’ I was like, ‘Fuck no.’ The problem was they didn’t know what to do with me or what box to put me in. I was trouble to them (laughs).”

Surprisingly, Bird hints that Home may even be her musical swansong and that she might do something else in the future. “I don’t know (shrugs)… I don’t even know what I’m talking about! I’m at the point in my life where I’m thinking, ‘Are you happy?’ and ‘What do I want to do now?’ So I thought I’d take time to make this album the way I wanted. But that might be it. I’m kind of thinking that I could be dead tomorrow. I’m not running away from something and I’m not unhappy with music. It’s like a chapter is closing.”

That said, an intense bout of touring will keep her very much involved in music into the near future. “I can’t wait to get out on the road again,” she enthuses. “This time around I’ll be going to countries I haven’t seen before. I’m going back to Japan, which I loved when I was there, and to Australia where I’ve never been. I’m really looking forward to it – it’s all about life experiences in the end.”

Home is out now on Mount Silver Records.