Birdy Flies Solo on Young Heart
Photo by Lotta Boman
Some folks, during the dark lockdown days of the pandemic, learned a lot from looking inward, taking the alone time to get lost in character-building self-reflection. But warbling singer/songwriter Birdy found the inspiration for her new album Young Heart outdoors, on her family’s ancestral grounds in rural England, and in—both ironically and aptly—an actual abandoned duckling she rescued, then raised, last summer. She named her Petrie, after the lovable baby pterodactyl in the animated The Land Before Time film she’d adored as a child, then raised the barely fledged stray like it was one of her own brood.
What life lessons can waterfowl impart? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Birdy—a less-unwieldy sobriquet than the one on her birth certificate, Jasmine Lucilla Elizabeth Jennifer van den Bogaerde (her great uncle was the distinguished actor Sir Dirk Bogarde)—was given the week-old hatchling after it had fallen into a friend’s pool; they thought she might be able to rehabilitate it, given her estate’s access to several nearby lakes. She searched the grounds for a suitable mama duck, to no avail. “So I ended up raising her myself, and she used to sleep in my bedroom, and she would literally sleep on my chest,” she chuckles. “She used to chase after me, and I even taught her to fly.” She pauses to correct that odd image. “Well, I couldn’t show her how to myself, but she started flying, and she would actually come flying in when I called. And then one day she just went back to the wild. It was quite amazing.”
The experience echoes the innocent, childlike wonder coursing through Young Heart, Birdy’s fourth effort. “If I could reach the Northern Lights / Maybe I could understand it all,” the keyboardist muses in her honeyed, throaty trill on the pliant ballad “Surrender,” which sets the somnolent, nature-reverent pace for the proceedings, “Evergreen,” “Lighthouse,” “New Moon,” “River Song” and “Celestial Dancers.” The moment she stops marveling at her verdant environment, or looking at the heavens in awe, she comes crashing back to Earth again in the anguished “Loneliness,” “Secondhand News” (“These days I’m self-destructing,” she mourns therein), and a gospel-soulful “Deepest Lonely,” in which she directly addresses her inner sadness with “When there’s dark clouds overhead / It’s me and you again.”
So first thing’s first, Birdy explains, building her case from square one. Yes, underneath it all, this is definitely something of a breakup album, she admits. And although she still loved her ex, she instinctively knew it was time to let them go and fly solo herself, just like Petrie. Shaking her codependent tendencies was difficult, and it made Young Heart her most difficult undertaking to date (her self-titled 2011 debut was comprised of less-taxing covers, a la the track that first got her noticed, her angelic take on Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love”). “But I just felt like I was at a bit of a crossroads—I was compelled to try new things and to be on my own, and I just felt like it was the right thing to do,” she says.