After 2023’s EP Burn The Hard Drive, which plunged us into Jade’s anger and existential confusion in the wake of a life-altering break-up, Who Wants To Talk About Love? zooms a little further out. “I wrote it over a long period while trying to make sense of the broken relationships in my family and the way they echoed into my own life when my engagement ended,” she says. She brings us into some of the most personal, psyche-forming bonds in her life: “It’s as much a question as an answer, wondering if I could break the cycle while finding my own path to forgiveness.”
The title Who Wants To Talk About Love is taken from the first single, a song Jade started writing when she was 16, which finds beauty in the pain of realising you’ve lost yourself in a relationship. But really, it has been generations in the making. Its ghostly aura echoes the ghost that she saw the women in her family become when they lost themselves in toxic situations and partners who took up so much space there was none left for them.
Jade’s mum had her when she was 19, and when Jade was around 7 years old her parents divorced. She and her mum moved from Germany to the UK to live with her grandmother, also freshly divorced from a troubled relationship: the three generations of women in pain in one house. The relationship between Jade’s parents had broken down amid a lot of conflict and this move was all about a fresh start. “They sheltered me from a lot of stuff, but, you know, I could tell my mum was hurting big time,” she recalls.
Around the same time, Jade started writing songs. From day one, her artistic expression was steeped in the fallout of romantic love. Sitting at the piano, she was - not necessarily intentionally - condensing the feelings hanging in the air at home into songs. “It didn’t feel like a jigsaw clicking into place,” she says, because life is rarely as neat as a movie montage. “But from then on I was always writing.”
Fast forward a few years. “I picked up grandma's guitar - and then it all really started coming out,” she laughs. Teenage angst brought with it all the drama of adolescence, but at the same time as Jade was learning the guitar and figuring her own self-hood out, her mum had entered another difficult relationship. “It all sort of accumulated in my artistic sense. When I listen to my early catalog, there’s a lot of anger. A lot of rage. My parents’ relationship was super conflict heavy - yelling was very normal; it’s a little bit Italian, but then it’s also really fucking stressful! I’ve followed that into my relationships; there was arguing, but there’d also be a lot of nasty arguing.” Because whether you know it or not at the time, “you’re following what you saw.”
In 2022, she realised how much those early models of relationships had shaped her when her engagement to a longtime member of her band disintegrated. They had recorded, toured and eventually moved to Austin together; everything about her life and her career had been wrapped up in this increasingly unhealthy relationship, coloured by vicious arguments and unhealthy behaviours. As it fell apart, Jade felt further from herself than she had ever been.
‘Dreams’ is an upbeat bop that was written mid-breakdown. It sounds like a shard of light but is actually “a very dark song”, Jade says. “It’s a captured moment at a really tough time.” She was driving through LA on her way to the studio, to one of her biggest sessions of her life (with Greg Kurstin). She was still engaged but starting to realise it was destroying her, emotionally and physically exhausted after a bad night’s sleep, and she saw a billboard that read, This is what dreams are made of. “That, with the LA sun, it just felt so deeply ironic... I was so completely broken, just like at the lowest point of my entire life. We wrote that song and cut the vocal; the production has changed quite a lot but the vocal stem was so important because I was like, you can’t really get rawer than that.” Amid the sunny production and upbeat piano riff, you can hear the wobble in her voice on the verses, the fight going out of her on the big chorus and the bite of self loathing in the lyrics.
On ‘Stick Around’, she dissects the way she, like her mother before her, lost herself in that relationship: “It was a way to process a lot of the stuff I was feeling after that break up,” she says, “I can’t shake this idea that we’re repeating fates.” Over strained guitar that grows increasingly fractious as the song wears on, she sings, “If you really loved me why was it so hard to stick around?” It was one of those songs that came out almost fully formed - “Sometimes it feels like you were tugging on a little string out the sky, and then it's like, woah,” she says. “It was like being under a fog; the start of being like, okay, I’m pretty low.”
‘Stick Around’ hints too at Jade’s dad, but nothing comes close to the searing, devastating emotion of ‘Wish You Well’, a song she’s spoken about before on social media and at live shows in which she tries to forgive her dad, tries to move on - almost manifesting the feelings that she doesn’t yet feel. “I’ve always been really upfront about the fact that this is not a song about a romantic relationship,” she says. “I haven't spoken to my dad in... about four years now - over a sort of disagreement at what being a father is.” It’s the sort of thing many people would shy away from talking about publicly, but sharing songs like ‘Wish You Well’ is at the core of why Jade even writes songs and puts them out into the world. For her to process her feelings, but for us too: “There’s not been one gig that someone hasn’t come up to me and been like, I fell out with my mum, I don’t speak to this person any more, I’ve lost this person... That connection, giving a person the opportunity to say ‘that’s how I feel’ - that’s the whole point in releasing music, especially at a time like this.”
Hard Drive was a musical detour, dipping a toe into a pool of synths under the guiding hand of Mura Masa; Who Wants To Talk About Love? sees Jade returning to her roots in acoustic guitar and modern Americana with her soaring voice always reaching for the light. The glimmer of light here is her current partner, Andrew xxxx, with whom she made the bulk of the album (talk about a bonding experience). ‘Save All Your Tears’ is a tried and true love song, a glistening layer of gold dust left in the pan after the sand and dirt has been washed away.
Once she started seeing patterns and shapes in the relationships in her own life, suddenly she was seeing them everywhere - including reality TV. The final piece of the puzzle that is Who Wants To Talk About Love? was ‘How To Be Happy’. “I got really into this really filthy reality TV show where all these divorced couples go into a house and start dating each other. And being the drama queen that I was, I was like ‘Oh my God, these people loved each other once - these people would lie next to each other and be like, you’re the one...’ how do you get here from there?” It tapped into a real and lasting fear: of love that doesn’t last and people who don’t stay. It was the final song she wrote for the record, and a reminder to herself that she doesn’t have all the answers quite yet.
It’s fitting that Jade started writing the title song and first single when she was 16. Because as she extricated herself from the bad relationship, examined her family's patterns and found new love and hope, she was looking to someone very specific for guidance, sometimes without really knowing it: her younger self.
“I know this sounds a little bit silly, but I genuinely think - and again this sounds so corny - but I became the through line: I started to use my debut [2019’s self-titled Jade Bird] as a real guide. Because even though I was 19, I was so sure of myself. I had a compass; even if I wasn’t sure about something, I knew deep down, ‘Oh this is what Jade thinks.’” Sometimes we inherit troubling patterns from our families; but sometimes we inherit the really good stuff too: “I got that from my mum. Little Jade - she was unstoppable against the world!” There are odes and tributes to Jade Bird scattered across the record. “I remember that being the last time I felt invincible, in a way. Confident. And I was like, I want some of that. So I’m gonna return to that as a woman, you know, instead of a girl.”
Now living in LA, Jade is happy with her partner and her dog and her work. It’s happy but it’s not an ending: she still wants to talk about love with you and anyone who’s open to it. “I don't feel like I want to talk about love because I know everything,” she pauses, throws her hands up and grins. “I know absolutely nothing!” No one can listen to Jade’s music and believe that to be true: but there’s always more to say and think and feel and learn. And for Jade Bird, it starts with a simple question: who wants to talk about love?
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