Wallis Bird returns with her new Album ‘I CAN SEE YOUR HOUSE FROM HERE’.
To get the true measure of WALLIS BIRD’s new album, I CAN SEE YOUR HOUSE FROM HERE, one only need hear ‘And So Turns The Wheel’, the song with which it opens. Ushering us warmly inside with a gentle, celestial swell, the Irish singer-songwriter, based in Berlin since 2012, constructs a timeless folk ballad whose overarching message is one of love beyond life’s measure. Arising from solemn roots, it hears her confess, “My tears are for you/ I spend them with pride,” and what unfolds from this doleful whisper across six or more minutes is a patiently, proudly transformative anthem that confronts that most delicate of subjects: the sudden death of a best friend. “I thought we had more time,” Bird laments, declaring finally that “Life goes on/ But it was better with you”. They’re lines indicative of both the record’s sentiments and the harmony holding them together.
According to Bird, I CAN SEE YOUR HOUSE FROM HERE, her first album as sole producer, “is about personal and collective grief.” It is, nonetheless, characterised by an indefatigable optimism that, over a career that’s won her multiple awards in both her native and adopted homelands, has always been central to her work. “Death is a dangerous subject to write about,” she admits, typically self-aware, “but it’s the most hypnotic, secret reflection of life. I found myself staring straight into a portal, compulsively documenting, not so much looking for answers as just looking. I felt simultaneously heartbroken and opened.”
That openness is undeniable, and it’s disarming too. On the keenly nostalgic ‘Grieving Is The Price You Pay For Love’, Bird invites us into her home, where “You and Trace chat in the hall,” while in contrast, on ‘I’ll Take Anything’, which is blessed with tender woodwind arrangements, she packs up her late friend’s home for the very last time, clinging to their diaries for dear life, weeping upon their floor. Rushing, too, towards the vigorous climax of the galloping ‘Let Me Buy You Flowers’, Bird fills the room around us with “incense watermelon sweet,” and on the joyful ‘To Love You Is To Have Done Something Good’, we accompany her in “a watercolour dream,” our faces “wet and salty”.
An intrepid vulnerability is key to these songs, distinctive in their blend of folk, rock, acoustic and pop, developed over years of crafting. Although on the gospel-hued ‘Call The Healer’ she can only brokenly hum its pivotal words first time around, she later makes no bones about her needs, bellowing “I want love/ More than anything/ Even you deserve some of it”. ‘Two Trees’, meanwhile, boasts a conjuring quality in its affectionate depiction of a phantasmal visit that leaves her “bathing in your vision”, and ‘Why Is Peace Problematic?’ turns the tables on mealymouthed disingenuity, cutting straight to the quick with its noble momentum. The tenacious ‘Hold Tight’ even passes the baton to a friend’s daughter, Bird’s tone both cautionary and sanguine: “Lucy will grow up to lead the leaders/ So all you fascists run, yeah/ All you fascists run”.
So, what lies behind these songs? After all, Bird being Bird, they’ll have been prised from recent experiences. In fact, her eighth album, written between October 2023 and December 2025, sprang from two contrasting sources: the crisis in Gaza that broke out almost three years ago, and the sudden passing of Bird’s close friend, fellow Berlin resident Kevin Ryan, just months after that tragedy had begun to unfold. For some five years, she and this “magnetising, mysterious” Irish musician had lived and worked together, and as well as playing a role on 2014’s Architect and 2016’s Home, singing and contributing artwork, he’d also mucked in more recently at the 150-year-old farmhouse that Bird and her partner had bought, on almost a whim, early in the pandemic. They’d purchased this home, initially without heat or running water, alongside two more couples – one Bird had only met for the first time at their first viewing – and it was here in countryside ninety minutes north of the German capital that they’d come to know Kevin as the “seventh Beatle,” Bird affectionately recalling how, “he just brought so much fun and love to the house”.
Ryan was even responsible for introducing Bird to Tracey Kelliher, her partner of 12 years. “Tracey, Kevin and I were rarely apart,” she expands. “Especially over the last years, we were thick as thieves, and losing him was like losing a rock star. The grief made some of our friends become completely isolated because we couldn’t express ourselves enough to reach out. A lot of these songs were written to help us get through it by singing together.” Thus it’s him that haunts these expressively titled compositions, whether on ‘And So Turns The Wheel’ (“Your voice in my ear, your boots at my door”), or in the simple image of an old black dog on ‘Grieving Is The Price You Pay For Love’ (“It feels like waiting/ Like a dog outside a shop”), or joining Bird on ‘To Love You Is To Have Done Something Good’ (“I hope you’re up there laughing, babes!”) or appearing to her on ‘Two Trees’ (“They looked like you and me”).
While Bird was struggling with her private grief, the whole world watched harrowing livestreams unfolding daily from Gaza. “We are forever changed” she rues. “Gazans have told us to bear witness to their crisis because journalists are routinely killed or banned. Even by the end of December, 2023, it was clear that we were being tested to see how much inhumanity, racism, and silencing we are willing to suffer in the name of profit and industry.” It was impossible for this not find its way into Bird’s writing, and the lyrical ‘I’m Your Witness’ bears testament to the anguish and the aftermath of Gaza. Indeed, ‘Let Me Buy You Flowers’ emerged from visions of “beautiful Palestinian children being horrifically targeted” as well as a dream about “a grandmother who’d died of a heart attack when her olive fields were razed. My friend later showed me a photo of a woman who’d died from the stress of protecting her beloved grove from bulldozers.”
Amid these songs and their mournful issues, Bird stands purposeful, calling for connection amid the wretchedness. “We are at the point of no return for our species,” she elaborates. “Boycotting capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy while fighting fascism in a climate crisis… We need each other.” In fact, precisely because these calamities, personal and collective, ran in parallel, Bird had to take her time to make sense of both. “Music came to me like a silent nurse,” she continues. “At my most scared and useless, she placed a guitar in my arms, and I cradled it and cried like a child, writing like my life depended on it. I bawled and banged drums at marches, and music gathered me together with the world again. I sang until I could cope.”
What arguably best illustrates the album’s consistently sober positivity is the company Bird keeps, heard in the voices around her lending support to these song’s melodies, just as her audiences do during her legendarily passionate performances. Inevitably, too, given her enduring urge to explore questions of resilience, identity, relationships, and social issues, this inclusivity reflects the world she’s built around her in reality. “I have a strong community in Berlin,” she smiles, “and a lot of that is through the arts. Now, through the farm, the six of us have extended that circle internationally. We’ve already hosted many, many gatherings in the four years since we opened our doors. We essentially got the farm to build a world community, and the coming years will see us sharing the space with all sorts of projects and groups.”
Naturally, Bird, who famously lost all fingers on her left hand in a childhood lawnmower accident – though four were happily reattached – sees her community flawlessly represented by the musicians playing beside her on I CAN SEE YOUR HOUSE FROM HERE, whose very title is lifted from one of Ryan’s lyrics. Naturally present – “like soil and seed” – was Kelliher, who weaves her voice, earthily and ethereally, throughout the album, which is dedicated to her, Ryan and, as Bird calls it, “their trio”. Bird’s “musical twin,” Aidan Floatinghome also stayed on the farm for days, contributing clarinet and vocals, as well as co-engineering, and often cooking “so that I could work in a flow state.” Her touring buddy Sam Vance-Law spent four days recording violin and vocals there, too, while on drums was Caoi De Barra – ironically, Bird herself has drummed for De Barra’s touring band in recent years – and, having offered years of guidance over previous albums, long-term collaborator Marcus Wüst returned to upright piano, Rhodes and vocals, as well as creating the final mix for this warm, open body of work.
“This was a tightly knit production,” Bird confirms. “Everyone involved has been collaborating with me since the beginning, or at least for many years, and we share the same values, all of us seeing art as medicine. If we’re going to clamber through the next twenty years, at least we can make compassionate art together and have something to live for.” So I CAN SEE YOUR HOUSE FROM HERE may sometimes speak to hopelessness, but its legacy is one of hope, and that it concludes with the ardent, suitably spectral ‘The Good Of The People’ attests to the convictions at its heart: “I want to believe in/ I have to believe in/ I try to believe in/ And I do believe in the good of the people…”
