Jade Bird – Open Up The Songbook w/ Emelise + Kayla Katz

Like falling in love, break-ups start slowly and then happen all at once. For Jade Bird, the end of her relationship gathered pace and crashed into reality in 2022, resulting in the beautifully temperate EP Burn The Hard Drive. It is a short collection of songs that paint the various stages of grief that come with the end of a relationship in devastatingly astute but carefully optimistic strokes. 

 

Bird has always railed against being pigeonholed and wary of collaboration. Having grown up in the UK, she was influenced heavily by Americana and hailed as a powerhouse performer. Even as she was compared to country-folk titans, in those early days she was determined to be fully Jade Bird without any shades of anyone else. Every note had to come from her. But for Burn The Hard Drive, she worked with Alex Crossan, known better as Mura Masa, finding freedom and joy in writing and experimenting with ideas in his modest home studio. Gradually, the songs found form and her emotions tumbled out into notes and melodies, shepherded by Crossan’s unique and encouraging ear. 

 

She had met her ex-fiance when she was just 18. He was a musician and she was newly signed. “It was an unsaid thing that it wouldn’t have worked unless he kind of joined my band and we toured together, so things evolved very quickly,” she says. So for the next few years as Bird’s career took off, they did everything together: recording, touring, writing, everything. “Every cool memory I’ve got musically, he’s in that. The second record is about him.” He was enmeshed in her life in a way that few of us experience. “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.”

Even as they got engaged and moved together to Austin, Texas, things began to break down. “There’s been so many times I’ve been on stage and I’ve just sort of had a bit of a breakdown, crying or whatever, because the songs are so interwoven into my experience.” Bird began writing the songs that make up the EP just after the hardcore lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic ended. “I think we were all going through something,” she says of those early writing sessions with Cossen. During one of the last writing sessions before the break-up, she wrote the song Burn The Hard Drive, a sultry, sorrowful song. “There’s no good goodbye, no right way to die,” she sings on the chorus before offering a digital Eternal Sunshine solution of destroying all evidence of a relationship. “I listened back to it with Alex and was like, ‘Oh my god this is a premonition of ending my relationship’.” 

It’s a short, reflective record, one that seems to send Jade Bird off on a new trajectory. Life has taken a turn too. She relocated to LA, started seeing someone new and has been embracing more pastimes outside of her career – at just 26 she’s already been a working musician for almost a decade. Even as her most collaborative work yet, Burn The Hard Drive sees her finally feeling like herself. It’s been a transformative time: and from the darkness, light has come.