I'm Not Just Some Face You Used to Know

Bob Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters in music in pop history, of course you will never see him on a greatest singers list. So it is no surprised that many of his songs went on to be hits for other artists (and in some cases becoming the definitive version) like Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds, Eric Clapton, Billy Joel; Adele even did one of his songs on her debut album. Bon Iver's Justin Vernon is another great songwriter who singing is not as good, and the annoying vocoder does not help, most notably on Skinny Love.

Enter YouTube: an acoustic version of Skinny Love has been done by every wannabe singer with an account. Seriously, simple YouTube search will land you “about 851,000 results.” Of the hundreds of thousands of versions out there, the unequivocal winner of the Best Skinny Love cover came from Birdy. The fifteenyear old British singer gave a classical sound to the song while singing over a sparse piano accompaniment reminiscent to Adele’s Someone Like You.

Her debut album had more of the same, sparse versions of songs that deserved more acknowledgements to mixed results. Songs like White Winter Hymnal (Fleet Foxes) and Shelter (The xx) were almost as beautifully as Skinny Love but it was a complete fail when she tried to slow down and class up Young Blood (The Naked and Famous) and managed to strip the song of all its youthful energy. Something you would never think an actually teenage would do.

At age seventeen, Birdy released her sophomore album Fire Within filled with her own material, some co-written with the biggest producers of the past decade incusing Ryan Tedder, Sia, Dan Wilson, and Mumford and Sons’ Ben Lovett. The US release finally came out this week and is basically the Bristish version with Skinny Love tacked on first and another song from the first album added as the final track.

Predictably Tedder gives Birdy a pop star makeover on Wings and Words as Weapons, the former is as loud and boring as you would expect from a Tedder assisted track. The latter starts out more acoustic, almost Mumford, before overproducing the song making it sound like one of the cheap Mumford style dance songs that are starting to get annoying. The Sia produced song Strange Birds is also predictably Sia in that it turns into the weirdest, darkest song on the album. It sours so high that all it needs is some more strings and it could pass as a Bond theme.

Also playing his part is Wilson, who actually wrote Someone Like You, who helps out on the piano ballad All You Never Say. His other contribution is Maybe, a bouncy acoustic track where for the first (and really only time) in two albums Birdy actually sounds like a teenager and ends up being a much better pop song than the two that Ryan Tedder overproduced. The third track Wilson helped out on, All About You, another sweet and stripped out mid temp song and another album standout. If her first album was showing the world she has a beautiful voice, the second album was trying to fit it within the current pop landscape. Hopefully by the third she find its but she is heading in the right direction when not working with Ryan Tedder.

Song to Download – Maybe

Fire Within gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.