Jade Bird

“Songwriting really kicked in with the guitar. I was going through a lot as a kid. There had been a lot of transitions in my family. So it just became a total therapy, like most artists.”

“It was always quite negative messages on love I was given as a kid.”

“I listen to a lot of artists like Tori Amos, Cherry Glazerr, and Patti Smith, and I kind of wanted to follow in their footsteps, or at least try to be that genre-defining.”

“I always try to be myself, be it a festival crowd or my own crowd.”

“I'd gig three to five times a week while I was doing my A-levels. I'd always come in with a runny nose 'cause I was always ill and run-down. But I just pushed through.”

“I'm just thinking about the vision for how I want my music to go and what I want it to say. I'm always creating in a way, even if it's just thinking about it.”

“I'd always been a kid that loved literature, reading, writing - anything to do with words - so music was just a path.”

“I don't want a middle-aged white man telling me how to write my feelings. It's not gonna work for me.”

“I always say the diversity, and culture is the one thing I love the most about the U.S. How you can travel across one borderline and you end up with this whole new set of people that I find super-interesting and great on tour.”

“Audiences in the U.S. can sometimes be a lot less refined. If they like something, they tend to express it more loudly.”

“As a songwriter, I've got a lot of facets, so to speak. When you come to a live show, you get a better sense of that, because you'll see me performing a piano ballad and some acoustic songs and some not acoustic songs, all in the same set.”

“I just always really loved music that was coincidentally from the States.”

“I see magic in conversation and words, and music is purely speaking to others, isn't it?”

“I've always been into music. My mom and dad used to always play music in the house.”

“I work a lot on words, so if I hear a word or see a word or a phrase or a sentence that someone says to me it just immediately sparks a concept.”

“I never expected I was going to travel the world playing gigs with my band and best friends. I have surpassed any dreams I had.”

“I want to start thinking about other people and the political climate. I can't sit here and write an album about myself. It just feels wrong.”

“I think with how society makes me feel like I should grasp onto the inner strength of me being a woman, and I felt like it was all just very much married into what I'm listening to, what I'm writing, how I'm feeling.”

“Cheating tends to come up a lot in my songs. Betrayal fascinates me. I think the fact that you can trust someone so much and then they go against that has always plagued my writing for some reason.”