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There are no signs of dubstep here, no electronics – save for some ambient tones and textures towards the end. If you thought Skinny Love was a triumph of still silence, you should hear Shelter. What she's about is a sombre showtunefulness, and she does it well. The fact that she's covered songs by Bon Iver and the xx is a bit of a red herring: it gains her access to another niche market – ie the indie demographic – but it's not what she's about. It's like going back to the pre-rock'n'roll era, to a time before teenage was invented. Adele is clearly one of Birdy's role models, and going by her two releases to date, she offers a glimpse of what it must be like to be 15 these days, and suggests it must be quite like being 25, or even 35. Now, they seem prematurely old, wise, sensible and sophisticated types suffering from a sort of sorrowful knowingness – singers such as Adele appear to have bypassed adolescence completely and gone directly to young adulthood. Thirty-five years ago, a typical girl (pun intended) of around the same age as Birdy might have been like Ari Up – fierce, outspoken, colourful, an extraordinary burst of energy and opinions, afflicted with a kind of joyous juvenile dementia. You can tell a lot about an era from its teen pop stars. She manages, using just voice and piano, to make Justin Vernon's plaintive paean sound like something Andrew Lloyd Webber might have penned for Elaine Paige. There, already some of the Birdy "style" is in place, if you compare the 12-year-old singing her own composition at the piano and the slightly older young woman singing Skinny Love in the moody video directed by Sophie "Ellie Goulding/Sade" Muller: it is, to cite one of the categories often used by musicians on MySpace, an example of "melodramatic popular song". There was actually one other song – So Be Free, with which she won, in 2008, the UK talent contest Open Mic UK, beating 10,000 entrants in both the under-18s category and the grand prize.
![little birdy shelter little birdy shelter](https://i1.wp.com/www.funkyrainbow.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Once-Upon-A-Time-there-was-a-Little-Bird.jpg)
We didn't write about her then because Skinny Love was the only song available by her at that point and we weren't sure whether it was enough to draw any conclusions about her as an artist. Actually, she was 14 when it charted – ancient compared to Rebecca Black, but still pretty young. The background: Birdy is the 15-year-old singer-songwriter whose cover version of Bon Iver's Skinny Love reached number 17 in the charts in March this year. The lineup: Jasmine van den Bogaerde (vocals).