Quotes from Jade Bird

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.

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.

I think that I'm a powerful female, a young singer-songwriter with an energy that's not really been done before. I think that's what people need to know about, you know.

My mum brought me up by herself, pretty much. She had me at the age of 20, and my grandmother was a single mother, too, for most of her life.

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 don't see any reason why young women shouldn't relate to me and have that connection with my music.

I always respected country music for its narrative and how it's so solid, you can get the picture in your mind.

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

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

I like my jumpsuits. They're easy to get about in, I can move a bit onstage, there's nothing to tuck in, and I don't look like a little girl.

I love playing live, and doing big TV shows are exciting.

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.

Songwriters such as Alanis Morissette write about the constant balance of contradictions, and that's something I adhere to in my life and work.

I like to keep morale up and not take things so seriously all the time. I enjoy life and laughs but I'm serious about the music. Serious about the craft of songwriting.

My focus on everything is songwriting, so I write all of my stuff by myself.

There's quite a stigma attached to country music in the UK - but I kind of enjoy that.

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.

My grandparents divorced, both of them, and then my mum and dad did. So it's like, divorce, divorce, divorce.

But when I was 12 or 13, I found the acoustic guitar and got into guitar music ultimately, like Black Motorcycle Club, obviously Neil Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash.

I'm always up for new places and new locations... I think it's the funnest part about the job.

No artist is one-dimensional. I get the sense that if I push myself now and if I create a million different-sounding songs - I just feel that's going to be such a set-up for my ability in the future.

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.

I think I'm eclectic and I'm never afraid to not know an artist or a band or an album because I want to hear it.

I can't emphasize enough how much of a writer I am.