Sunday 13th September 2026
Location: Cleeres Bar and Theatre, 28 Parliament Street, Kilkenny
In stock
Album: I CAN SEE YOUR HOUSE FROM HERE – By Wyndham Wallace
Release Date: 05.06.2026
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 d
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