it became a source of much angst to me, an older-than-Birdy-but-still-teenage Bon Iver super-fan, that
many people thought it was her original song. Adult me can concede that it was a pretty decent cover: her musicality and vocal ability certainly were not representative of the average 14-year-old.
It’s ironic that Birdy’s new record
should be called
Young Heart, because even though she is only 24, it sounds a bit, well, old. Her fourth album, and comeback after a three-year hiatus, it processes her first major heartbreak, but it sounds somehow nostalgic or retrospective, like a sage hippie looking back on her youth. On the cover of the record there is a photograph of Birdy sitting on the steps of a porch, looking small and delicate behind her guitar, at an indeterminate time and temperature (it could be a chilly morning in 1982, or a warm evening in 2019) and laughing, covering her mouth with a