Wallis Bird: “I spent the best part of two years giving-in to every feeling that came from grief"

Death affects people in different ways. Wallis Bird had been lucky enough not to have been touched by it for most of her life. That was until December 2023, when the news broke that Mayo-born musician Kevin Ryan, her closest collaborator and best friend, died suddenly in Tenerife.

“We lived together, we knew each other inside out,” says Bird, who’s noticeably emotional but still chatty over a video call from Berlin. “He was my chosen brother here, so I was like, ‘Well, what am I going to do without my everyday guy?’”

What Bird did was make a record. I Can See Your House From Here is her eighth album, though the process was different to what came before. For two years, she gave in to everything grief threw at her.

“It’s been a really, really beautiful process,” she says. “It was kind of a byproduct, the music. This album was coming away from something and learning how to deal with major grief. I have lived the grief correctly. And I know how to do this now, because there’s going to be lots in the future. Now I have a toolbox to help me out.

“I spent the best part of two years giving-in to every feeling that came from grief. Sometimes, all I could come up with is a line like ‘da da diggy diggy da da diggy diggy da.’ But I was like, ‘Just don’t say no to an idea.’ There’s a learning curve of writing an album about grief: it’s been fruitful and scary and horrible and sad. And at the end, I’m feeling okay. I’m feeling good.”

A LOUD IMMIGRANT

The album was also Wallis’ first solo production. Bird left the microphones open, so that the building works and the sound of the rain filtered through to accompany her dynamic and detailed folk songs. The title, meanwhile, came from her late friend.

“It’s a really throwaway lyric in one of Kevin’s songs,” Bird says. “He was an incredible songwriter. And it’s just him talking about beginning to fall in love and that he’s looking at his love’s house. I really think he helped me write this record. I Can See Your House From Here just kept repeating – I kept hearing him saying it in my head. It felt good to reference one of his gorgeous throwaway lines.”

The title also carries weight as a reference to the razing of homes in Gaza. Processing loss on a personal and global scale hasn’t been easy living in Germany.

“I’m in a country where it almost feels illegal to grieve or feel sorry for a people such as the Palestinians,” Bird says. “And so, recognising what it means to lose one person, and feeling emotionally connected to the genocide in Gaza, and not being able to turn to everybody to talk about my grief with Gaza here in Germany, just compounded everything.

“Myself and my partner bought a house over here with two other couples, for community living. And it became just an untouchable subject, and it was like, ‘Fuck, what are we doing?’ I mean, you have to sign letters here saying that you believe in the state of Israel and that it has the right to exist.

“I just thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ Then I realised that I’m here at the right time, and that I have a purpose: to be a loud immigrant, basically. To say what I can in the way that I can, and try to remind people of humanitarian law and humanity.

“The German people have really worked so hard to overcome their history. They teach their kids in school about what they’ve done, and they teach them by shame. When it comes down to it, war is big money, and Germany’s a huge arms dealer. So as far as I can see, they convinced people not to talk about it, so that they can continue business as usual. Which is very upsetting. I don’t believe for a second that German people believe this is right. I think they’re just scared.”

ANTI-WAR MESSAGE

Despite, or perhaps because of, all the turmoil, there is little room for negativity or self-pity on I Can See Your House From Here. Bird has transformed her loss into something cathartic on songs like ‘Grieving Is The Price You Pay’, and the LP carries a strong anti-war message through ‘Why Is Peace Problematic?’ and ‘The Good Of The People’.

When did she start looking at grief through a positive lens?

“It’s a very touchy subject, and if you find any humour in death, it’s seen as flippant,” Bird begins. “But it’s not. If you don’t laugh, you’ll never stop crying. There is humour in death. One day everything’s fine and then the next day your world is broken. Tell me that’s not a fucking joke. The fact that we’re not prepared for it is a joke.”

The real shift happened after ‘And So Turns The Wheel’, which was spawned from some spiritual circumstances. Or necromancy.

“‘And So Turns The Wheel’ was the beginning of something,” she says, pinpointing where it all changed. “I reached the other side, and I opened up. I said, ‘Haunt me.’ I was having proper conversations with my pal, with my dead fucking pal. I was asking him what to do, and he said, ‘Observe and pay attention to what grief is making you feel.’

“There were lots of dreams, lots of people approaching me on the street and being like, ‘Have you talked to Jesus today?’ It’s uncanny. I think your face can’t hide when you’re very vulnerable, and people reach out more, and people want more of you, because they look in your eyes and see there is something missing.

“I just opened myself to it, and I actually started doing a lot of tarot readings, some seances. I talked to astrologers, palm readers, psychics, priests, nuns. I didn’t reach out to these people. A lot of them reached out to me because they knew what I was going through.

“When I needed a friend and I needed help, that’s when the songwriting came. The previous 20 years of releasing music made sense. I could talk to my friend, I could talk to death, I could understand life. I could figure out how to stop crying in front of everybody, I could figure out somewhere to put the pain.”

The grief might have been novel, but Bird’s ability to find light in the dark is something of a habit. It’s well known that a childhood lawnmower accident claimed a finger, prompting Bird to flip a right-handed guitar and create her own percussive, trademark style.

MOST IMPORTANT ALBUM

Growing up as a gay woman in Wexford wasn’t easy either.

“I always stop myself and don’t allow myself to be damned by the future, because I live through a matriarchal system; I think about children and the elderly first,” Bird says. “I can’t afford to not think about [being positive]. I work on it. I work on not being jealous. I work on not being worried, and it takes a lot of work, but I find it’s way too easy to just be down in the dumps.

“My lot in life was to talk about heavy things, such as growing up being gay, when it was illegal and certainly shamed. And then growing up being a woman in the industry, and then growing up in the #MeToo era, and now just being, you know, a white woman in her 40s, looking towards the future.”

Still, something has changed with this record. Is it her most important album?

“Yeah. By far,” she says. “By far. I stopped trying to control how I look at things and actually just look at things as well. I used to think my first record felt like a breakthrough for me, because I was speaking about love in an illegal world. It was really important to me that it felt universal and not gendered, because I was hiding it, but I needed to speak about how beautiful love from my perspective is.

“But this new album came out when I had nowhere to turn, and music just came to me when I needed it the most.”

• I Can See Your House From Here is out now.