Hollywood spent a good half-century and several billion dollars to explain: Texas is not a place, it’s a diagnosis. Cowboys there are silent more eloquently than any monologue, sunsets last longer than the laws of physics allow, and love is either eternal or tragic – there is no third option. John Ford, Clint Eastwood, Wim Wenders – all of them, sooner or later, turned their camera in that direction and froze. Bird, it seems, couldn’t resist either.
The singer’s second EP – “Strange As Folk”, released on May 1, 2026 – gathered five songs, and each of them is like a river: some flow faster, others slower. Anglo-Irish artist Bird (Janey Price) lives halfway between Tuscan hills and London fog – and, it seems, in such a geographical split draws something inaccessible to those firmly tied to a single address. In the new work, she continues moving from chamber indie folk toward a cinematic, tangible sound, in which details are illuminated by a soft honey light.
Cinema begins from the moment the white canvas of the screen flares with light. Like the EP’s opening track “The Film” – a cinematic prologue, an overture one wants to listen to with eyes closed, imagining how the camera moves slowly. Strings carefully bring things into focus – prolonged and singing – while Bird’s voice constructs the sonic space with methodical precision. The singer delivered a perfect soundtrack for a rainy evening spent at home by the fireplace with a glass of wine that you forget about after the first sip. The next step – and immediately a challenge: Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay”. Taking on such material is about as risky as rearranging furniture in someone else’s apartment. Everyone knows where the sofa should stand. But Bird does it more elegantly: she doesn’t rearrange the furniture, she rebuilds the building itself. The EP offers two versions – a studio one and an Austin Texas Version. The first is introspective, a confidential conversation with the song. The second breathes with the dusty wind of the American plains, smells of live performances in small bars, where the beer is warm, but the music is not. Two versions of one song form a stereoscopic portrait of longing, shot from different points. I liked both.
A separate discovery of the EP is the track “The Boy And The Swan” – in it, poetry takes over everything else. The transition from Dylan’s dualism to this quiet ballad is felt not as a change of track, but as a change of time of day – from twilight to that deep night when thoughts become more honest. The image of the boy and the swan balances on a thin edge between fairy tale and psychoanalysis. The melody is created by a trembling voice, echoed by guitar and oboe, then strings and other instruments appear – all in intelligent and warm hands. In imagination arises a misty shore, still water, something that does not let go and does not leave. It seems Bird consciously avoids theatricality, choosing beauty instead of unexpectedness.
The EP is concluded by “Havana Garden”. At the core of the song is a story that Bird read in a British newspaper and could not let go. A Cuban cemetery, where locals come not to mourn, but to worship a miracle. A mother buried together with a small child – by local tradition, at her feet. When the bodies were exhumed, the child was found in the mother’s embrace. “It brought me to tears,” says the singer. And you believe it immediately. Written in co-authorship with Texas singer Jane Ellen Bryant – at the Austin Florence Alliance writing camp in Bird’s Tuscan studio – the song carries the geographical weight of its creation. Texas and Italy, Cuban folklore and the classical education of the British musician. Producer Pete Davis, who worked with Dido and PJ Harvey, assembled everything into a single whole without losing a gram of fragility. The strings begin slowly, spreading like morning fog over a field. The voices of Bird and Bryant intertwine naturally and gracefully: this is the first time the artist recorded a female duet in this way. “I really like that Jane sings with me,” she says, and in the song itself you can hear how this “like” transforms into something more. “Havana Garden” is a song about faith, about the beauty of loss, about maternal love that is stronger than any boundaries – even the final ones.
In “Strange As Folk” everything happens on thin edges. Bird sings about things that cannot be held – love, loss, memory. The camera pulls away. The music fades. You are still sitting. Hollywood spent half a century to explain Texas. Bird, five songs – and explained something greater.
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