Home
Wallis Bird had been quietly working on her fifth album for the best part of eighteen months when, last November, she was asked to play a new track. Since her first album, she’d always written while on tour, but, following her last, ‘Architect’ – which entailed particularly heavy touring, playing to over 25,000 people around Europe and Japan – her management had encouraged her to take a break. The ensuing process had been a joy, but her friend’s request unexpectedly floored her. “I totally froze,” Bird confesses. “I’d been alone in my studio, in my own head, for too long.”Â
Bird’s last album, her fourth – 2014’s ‘Architect’ – celebrated this relocation, but while Home picks up where it left off, this isn’t a familiar ‘Berlin album,’ with its decadent protagonist found nursing a habit. “‘Architect,'” Bird explains, “was the blueprint to this great life and musical plan I was hatching: ‘girl meets girl, girl falls in love and happy ending ensues. ‘Home’ is the happy ending!”
Indeed, ‘Home’ is such a celebration of the love Bird now enjoys with her muse and partner that she not only refers to it as a “thank you letter” but its cover also features the two of them locked in an affectionate embrace. That she wears her heart on her (record) sleeve is perhaps unfashionable, but it’s certainly not uncharacteristic of Bird.
Suitably, Home was largely recorded in Bird’s home studio, then completed at Kleine Audiowelt, near Mannheim, where she’s worked regularly in the past, and after two years focussed on the record, she’s eager to get out on the road again.
