“I am really enjoying The Japanese House . She’s a great songwriter. I love Remi Wolf and her voice. I think she’s amazing. Just, like, the girls,” Bird says of what she’s been listening to as of late. “I love Chappell [Roan]. I love Charli [XCX] ’s new album. I listened to a little bit of Normani’s album yesterday, and that’s so fun. Yeah. I love the girls.”
Ask anyone else, and Bird’s name would likely be added to that list of recent listens. The 25-year-old has been on a steady climb the last few years, catapulted lately by her touring appearances with girlfriend Reneé Rapp . After two years in the making, Bird’s debut album “American Hero” drops Friday.
Bird will have returned back to Los Angeles from a week of press in Australia, just in time to celebrate the release properly: “I’m going to hopefully have a party and get aggressively drunk,” she says.
The lead-up to the release has included a wave of emotions, but Bird admits to feeling a bit apprehensive.
“But I think once it actually comes out and I actually get to feel the tangible reception from people and start to get feedback on it, and people will have listened to it, then I think I’ll actually be able to feel proud and excited,” she says. “As of right now, it just feels like it’s kind of a pot of boiling water.”
“American Hero” by Towa Bird.
Bird was back and forth between Hong Kong and Thailand for the first 16 years of her life, before moving to the U.K. Three years ago, she made the jump to L.A.
“They’re just like that as people,” Bird says of her parents and their preference for moving. “They are quite nomadic and they just like to explore. My dad speaks three languages and he’s just a cool dude. I think they wanted to see a different part of the world and wanted to show me and my sister a new culture and a new environment.”
She credits living in a mix of places with helping her songwriting abilities.
“What it was for me was learning how to communicate with people from quite diverse backgrounds, from such a young age, being in a country where the mother tongue isn’t English, and just learning how to communicate with people differently. It’s like when you speak to someone who isn’t fluent in English, you change a little bit how you speak. And it’s interesting,” she says. “You learn more about yourself at least, and you describe things in different ways. So I think in a way, maybe there’s something in my lyricism that has the ability to reach a little bit further because I’ve communicated with such different people throughout my entire life.”
The album, which skews more rock than most of the above-mentioned pop artists, is conceptually “Towa 101” she says.
“It’s kind of an introduction to who I am and what I think about and what I care about and parts of how I identify and my heritage and all of that. There’s very emotional and vulnerable parts. There’s also silly and funny parts. There’s also very rip-roaring guitar, and that’s in your face, and there are chiller songs,” she says. “I feel like I take you through the world of my personality a little bit and show you some of the deep scary corners, and then also some of the lighthearted, playful stuff.”
Naming her album “American Hero” is intentionally tongue-in-cheek for the non-American. She began working on the album as she tried to acclimate to American culture in L.A.
“It’s completely satirical as I have no American blood in me. I had no heritage here. I’m a non-U.S. citizen,” she explains. “And the hero element is there are lots of moments where I’m very vulnerable, very tender in this album, and showing parts of myself that I haven’t before. So I think that’s subverting what you would think of as a hero, which is the big masculine, very cis blond man, which is clearly nothing that I embody. But then in a way, maybe I’m the new version of what an American hero looks like, which is a queer, biracial person who’s actually not even from here.”
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