New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Like falling in love, break-ups start slowly and then happen all at once. For UK-born, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Jade Bird, she had met her ex-fiance when she was just 19.
He was enmeshed in her life in a way that few of us experience, as he joined her band and they toured together. "When you're in a relationship like that, when it's good it's so good. You've got support at work, you're on the road together: it's this romantic ideal. And when it's not good, it becomes a bit of a living hell." The end of her relationship gathered pace and crashed into reality in 2022.
Bird had already begun working with the celebrated Grammy-nominated producer and songwriter Alex Crossan, known better as Mura Masa, and in one of the last writing sessions before her breakup, she wrote the single, "Burn The Hard Drive".
The sultry, sorrowful song has her characteristically powerful voice singing the chorus "There's no good goodbye, no right way to die," before offering a digital Eternal-Sunshine solution of destroying all evidence of a relationship- "Burn the Hard Drive". Working with Mura Masa, who has worked with A$AP Rocky, Pink Pantheress, Ariana Grande and more, Bird found freedom and joy in writing and experimenting with ideas in his modest home studio. "I listened back to it with Alex and was like, 'Oh my god this was a premonition of ending my relationship'."
For the official video, Bird reunited with director Aries Moross, whom she worked with previously on her debut album. Together they created a video where reality is slightly altered; people appear but are then erased, clouds and skies shift and vanish as if only half recollected and we are confronted by the imperfect way in which we experience our own memories.
It's quite a departure for Bird, much gentler than her previous two albums, which include her chart-topping 2019 self-titled debut album and her Dave Cobb-produced follow up, 2021's Different Kinds of Life. There's more twisting, mesmerizing riffs than the hard strums that have become a kind of trademark. "Rage became a huge point of contention for me - I grew up in a high conflict household so I think my albums have been about getting that out - but with Alex, for some reason, that wasn't what was coming out. It's a little different. I think it's exploring the emotions before the rage," she says, before adding with a grin: "I'm saving the rage for the album."
Jade Bird released her first EP Something American when she was just 19 years old. Her song "Lottery", topped the Adult Alternative Songs, making her the fifth female solo artist to top that chart since 2010. She had a #1 on AAA-radio with and a #5 on Americana with her single "Headstart". With her first two albums she won the SXSW Grulke Prize, was the BBC Radio 1 Sound Of and appeared on Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, James Corden, Jools Holland and more.
