Wallis Bird takes the long road to Home and happiness

If home really is where the heart is, Wallis Bird is sorted. The Wexford musician has spent most of her adult life on the move - first from Enniscorthy to Dublin for college; then to Mannheim in Germany; then to London, when she signed a deal with Island Records.

These days, she finds herself back in Germany, a Berliner for the past four years. But home? It is most certainly where her heart is, particularly if both the title and cover of her fifth album - which depicts her in an embrace with her partner, a Kerrywoman whom she met in Berlin - is anything to go by.

“I’m really enjoying being in one place and being in harmonious tune,” she says philosophically when we meet for coffee in Dublin, shielding her moderately hungover eyes from the bright sun spilling in through the window. “I feel like I’m vibrating now, and before I was just... flapping around. I feel like I’m vibrating and I’m feeling good.”

Bird has made her living as a musician for a decade now, releasing a succession of well-received albums that have encompassed pop, rock and folk - and, as exhibited on 2014's Architect - traces of electronica informed by her indulgence in Berlin's nightlife. She admits that there for Home, she threw caution to the wind in terms of how it sounds.

"I as always trying to be traditional in a sense; stick with 'real' instruments and I didn't touch electronica until Architect. But that record is shite in comparison, for me," she says, bluntly. "The first half of it is grand, and after that... I didn't know who I was, where I was going, and it was all very... excitable. And boring, actually, in a way."

Reckoning point
"I'm 33 now, and after doing a load of things, and stuff, and mistakes, and achievements... it's like, you kind of come to a reckoning point. I just kind of stopped giving a shit, really. I stopped worrying about what others would hear; I thought, if anybody's interested in hearing what I have to say, I'll just lay it out real plainly."

Her turning point, she says, was embarking on a new relationship, which got off to something of a rocky start.

“I wrote the last album when I met my partner – my partner now,” she says. “I was all ‘We need to be together’, but she didn’t want me. And it was the first time that it was ‘No, you can’t have what you want’ and I was like, ‘Oh, shit’,” she laughs.

“So there was this juvenile yearning, and thinking back on that really annoys me. I do appreciate the record, obviously. I appreciate them all, because they’re zeitgeist - but it was definitely not my best work, because it was way too rushed. With this one, I had all the time in the world, and that was the deadly thing.”

Her newfound sense of freedom to write the new album took hold when her manager wiped her calendar clear in front of her early last year.

“I swear, watching that happening was like... wow. I didn’t have to do anything but write music; I didn’t have to gig, didn’t have to go anywhere. I’d never had that, ever, in my life. I’d always gone to school or college, or been on someone else’s time - but [at the same time], I was mad for the work, I couldn’t get enough work into me. I was home for 60 to 80 days a year, if I was lucky, over the last decade. So watching my manager wipe the calendar clean and telling me that I didn’t need to do anything was a revelation.”

Writing and recording from home – as she did with the majority of this album – has its upsides.

"What I've found out that's amazing is if you call the record Home, then you can do a ton of shit at home," she says, chuckling. "But I really got particular with it, because I thought I'd get lazy and find distractions – so I treated it as a thesis, something I was really interested in doing, instead of feeling like I was doing it because I had to.

I thought ‘Right, get out of bed at nine, take a walk, work until you’re tired, have a nap and then when you’re fed up working on that style, move on to something else.’ I kept saying to myself ‘Don’t get annoyed with what you’re doing, see it through’ – and that was the point, to absolutely not get annoyed with what I’m doing, and not let it frustrate me to a point that I didn’t want to do it anymore.

“And don’t sing about anything upsetting – because there was nothing upsetting me in life. I’m really happy now, so I thought ‘Alright then, just write about that, and be okay about that.’ It was a lovely process.”

Sense of ease
There is a undoubtedly a flow and a sense of ease to Home that hasn't been as prominent in Bird's work in the past, often fiery and brazen and underpinned with a sense of likable agitation. Here, tracks such as the beautiful That Leads the Way, Love and the title track, sung sean-nós style, leave no room for misinterpretation.

"Yeah, there is no puzzle to anything," she smiles. " It was just telling a few stories, really. That Leads the Way is a song that does something to me that I never had with another song; I can't explain it. I was really lucky to grab something there, with that song, that I hadn't before."

Having made what might well be her most well-rounded album, it seems that Wallis Bird is pretty happy with her lot these days. The self-described cocky young twentysomething that went through major label disappointment, several relocations and relationship trauma has come out the other side, smiling. For the first time, there is no five-year-plan, or 10-year-plan, or career trajectory to fulfil. She has, you might say, come home.

“No joke, this is all I need,” she says, flashing one of those infectiously dazzling smiles. “I don’t need anymore and I’m happy to walk away right now. I’m happy to start a family now, if I can; start a new job now. I do not need any more, I’m incredibly lucky. To need more is too much. So I don’t have a plan – I just want to be able to express my love. And that’s what I’ve done with this album.”

- Home by Wallis Bird is out now on Mount Silver/Caroline International. Read our four-star review here