The Tweet Hereafter

What happens when the thing you’ve been doing your whole life, the thing that comes most naturally, suddenly has a price put on it and is subjected to scrutiny by folk with a vested business interest and a hundred opinions, who tell you you’re not so hot after all?

Quite a knock to the self-esteem, one imagines. Such a thing might make a soul think twice about their purpose on the earth. Might drive a person to second-guess a process that had hitherto seemed easy and unselfconscious. Might drive an artist towards dissecting the golden goose. Next stop – horror of horrors – the block.

Such was the fate of Enniscorthy-born songwriter Wallis Bird, who, following the release of her debut album Spoons, parted company with Island Records and had to face up to some unpalatably fishwifey home truths. It’s a credit to her craft and graft that the listener divines no such impression from her new record New Boots, the first fruit of a domestic deal with Rubyworks and an international one with Columbia, a supremely confident and sometimes moving collection of songs that represent the full spectrum of the Bird’s artistic, um, plumage.

“I think I was still with Island when I was writing about three of the songs,” she recalls, “and I just kept getting told my songs were not good enough, don’t-bore-us-get-to-the-chorus, this kind of thing.”

One imagines such an experience is akin to having a physician open you up, examine your reproductive faculties and grimace in disapproval.

“It was like being told you’ve got a disability or something,” Bird admits. “And I got an awful knock, I felt I couldn’t do what I always satisfied myself doing, and I got this writer’s block, the typical thing. Everything I was doing was being ripped apart, how I looked, how I talked, my onstage show, everything that I truly believed in was just... shit, basically.”

Sounds like your classic dysfunctional relationship. Someone says they’ve fallen hopelessly in love with you and a couple of months later they’re picking apart the very attributes they once claimed to adore.

“Exactly. And whenever anybody asks me about it, I say, ‘It was just a marriage. I married my career into certain people, and certain people you just have to divorce. I hate using the word ‘career’ ’cos it’s my life, what I do, it’s my disposition, and you just have to get rid of the people who are dragging you down. But in the grand scheme of things it was over and done with pretty quickly. I kind of asked to leave the label, and it was such a relief. Then I got all these nice festivals, and it started to come together the way it did before we had a major label, building up my team, starting all over again, all of us going through a lot of changes money-wise. So it was quite a strange two years, dropping from the label, dropping lots of different people in the band and... Oh God, it was just mental. It was good though, I can’t regret any of it.”

And, as the Bird affirms, there’s always a sense of emancipation in beginning again. But it’s no small irony that her parting from Island precipitated the very sharpening of songwriting methods that might have been demanded in the boardroom.

“The whole time I thought I couldn’t write a song, I was writing hundreds of riffs,” she remembers, “and so I started to trying to build something around a really simple idea. So this kind of crafting of songwriting came about, which was new to me, ’cos I always wrote just from feeling, or it just happens. I started thinking about what I wanted to say, if I really wanted to pour myself into it.

“And then I broke up in a relationship, and that just broke my heart. It was a very beautiful relationship and I didn’t want to damn it because... when you wrote about ‘Measuring Cities’ (in a recent HP review), that if it wasn’t so masterful it would be harrowing, I remember thinking that the song was so harrowing when I sang it to myself, but I recorded it a bit hopeful, because I didn’t know if the relationship was going to get back together or not, so I didn’t want to kill the hope completely.”

As you might have guessed, dear reader, these are intense songs, from the dizzy, giddy love-buzzed heights to the depths and troughs of jealousy and obsession and dependency. But despite all the heartache, the Bird’s new songs bristle and glisten with what Herzog might have termed a kind of ecstasy of truth. Some of them are bizarrely radio friendly, but the arrangements still wend and weave. The single ‘To My Bones’ for instance, is an exuberant little epic that enters Alice’s rabbit hole in the middle eight before returning the listener safely to the reorientation zone of the chorus. In terms of musical sensibility, it’s halfway between the Van of Astral Weeks and Moondance.

“I put little puzzles together in the songs,” Wallis explains, “it’s like an introverted conversation, questioning myself: ‘Do I really mean this?’ And then as I sing it and sing it, I begin to realise it more, and towards the end when I scream, ‘Oh life I love you to my bones!’ I truly mean it.”

Advice from your old Agony Uncle Murphy, my broken-hearted lambs: fake it ’til you make it. ‘To My Bones’ works for both author and audience as a mantric affirmation.

“Exactly, if you keep saying it to yourself until you mean it, then it will be true. One thing that really helped with that song was all the people around me were getting pretty depressed and I said, ‘Fuck this, we’re in a bad way as friends, or as a team, and we need a bit of sunshine, so let’s keep singing this.’ I really needed that in my life after a lot of very dark moments. Yeah, an affirmation.”

A couple of months ago, Mundy spoke to us of the toll exacted upon him in the wake of a break-up by having to sing love songs written at the height of the romance. Bird empathises for sure, but ever the trouper, insists the show must go on.

“If you don’t do it you’re just a piece of concrete,” she says. “Songs like ‘Measuring Cities’, I knew I was going to have to sing them live because I love touring, and that’s why some of the songs are left open-ended, so that I would be able to depict different messages or meanings for myself. I tried to leave them as open as possible so I could put my humour through them at the moment.”

Better to have loved and lost than not at all. Except letting go of the damned thing is the hard part. The lover in recovery is an addict in withdrawal, disorientated by a process of transference that confuses the dealer with the stuff, equating the delirium of love itself with the person who brought it to them as a gift. But like Mary Margaret says, you will be loved again. And even if you won’t, that fate wouldn’t be as bad as the burden of thinking about it every day for the rest of your life.

“Yeah, that’s a really good thought to have in your head,” the Bird concludes. “‘Cos if you’re thinking that will never happen, chances are it won’t. You demand what you want for yourself, but you have to internally demand it through the power of thought. So when you’re feeling in a really deep, dark place, you have to work yourself out of that, because nobody else is going to. You have to communicate and converse and get it out into the open, get the words out and really will yourself back to some sort of happiness or comfort.”

New Boots is out now on Rubyworks. Wallis Bird plays Whelan’s, Dublin (July 24) and Cyprus Avenue, Cork (25).