In every interview you read with Ireland’s Wallis Bird, each searing or celebratory lyric, you can’t help but feel she’d be a great person to spend time with over drinks.
That image is deftly reinforced when we speak; for Bird, it is late at night, and to take the call she must step into a (sort of) empty hallway in the midst of a house party. The soundtrack to our conversation is the collision of Irish and German accents, of clinking glasses and goodbye-kissed cheeks. Bird sounds like someone who has finally taken the time to stop and enjoy her surroundings.
“It’s funny you should say, because that time is now, it really is,” she says. “It hit the point where I’d been touring hard for a decade, and I totally believed I could keep going. But my management said to me, ‘I think now is the time for a break. You’ve done far too many gigs in too short a time. You’ve lived in too many suitcases, you’ve left clothes unwashed too many times.’ But I would have kept burning the candle at both ends until they stopped me.
“So it wasn’t my own choice to stop, but I have to say it was a pretty good choice that they made me stop. I feel good about it now. “I put life into perspective. As soon as I turned 32, I started to look over what I’ve done. I hear at 35 your face changes.”
Given her debut Australian tour stretches across December and January – taking in a host of solo gigs as well as the Woodford Folk Festival – Bird’s next birthday will be spent Down Under, but the prospect doesn’t faze her. Indeed, she has quite an impromptu family already waiting for her here.
“I haven’t been to Australia before, but a tonne of my friends have headed over. So going there, it’ll be like a homecoming without it ever being home. I didn’t have the right context before to visit. I could have gone over, but to be honest, I would have played the Irish card. And I didn’t want to do that. So I waited until we met the right people, and I’m also not in a hurry to do things. A lot of my friends have been travelling all over the world much longer than I have, and it’s made me think, ‘Fuck, why aren’t I doing that?’ But all in good time.
“Since then, we met really fabulous people, like [artist agent/manager] Cathy Kirkpatrick, [Woodford programme director] Chloe Goodyear. They’re both really something special. Now, with all of what I’ve done, with all the experience that I’ve had, that’s been the making of who I am. Distilling down to the essence of who I want to be working with, and how. I’ve done the whole licking ashtrays and kissing arses thing, and there’s not a lot of that in me. I’d rather be working. And that just took time. I had the opportunity before, but now is when it feels right. Took its feckin’ time, though,” she laughs.
Better late than never, and while Bird would surely have been welcomed had she breached our shores years ago, there’s likely truth in her commitment to biding time. Her live energy is the stuff of legend, and her most recent album, Home, is a hell of a showcase of her talents. She is being supported by Tullara – one of those friends who supported her all those moons ago – as she tours her solo show from state to state, and Bird has taken cues from an unlikely source to ensure at least a portion of each performance is hers and hers alone.
“I was watching this thing about Anthony Hopkins, and he said the more you give of yourself, the less you can take away for yourself. If you give away 100 per cent, what can you take back at the end and think, ‘I’ve learned something today’? So give 90 per cent, and be calm with what you’re giving. In a situation where you’re supposed to be creatively open and free and on and giving and forthright all the time, you want to show people your real side. So do 90 per cent for the show, and 10 per cent for you.
“Writing, you also have to be true. I have to dig down deep and see what the song wants to say. But ultimately, I’m just a vessel. The song is going to tell me what instrument it wants to go to, and I think that’s why I become magnetised to a certain style or beat. That’s how my songs get written. I just learn how to play these instruments that the song wants me to learn. I honestly feel like I’m sometimes not even part of the parcel any more, but it still makes me grateful. I just try to stay open to it.”
Wallis Bird’sHome is out now through Caroline/Universal, and she appears at Newtown Social Club, Thursday January 12, with William Crighton and Tullara in support, and Woodford Folk Festival 2016/17, Woodfordia, Tuesday December 27 – Sunday January 1.
