Dido has taken five years off between albums, but she hasn't been wasting her time. With a new baby and a fresh batch of heartfelt ballads, she's re-energised and ready for the limelight, she tells the BBC."I am the sound of modern conflict."Not words you'd expect to hear from Dido, purveyor of wistful balladry and Queen bee of adult pop.But apparently the singer frequently gets "letters from people who are in the middle of a war" telling her they've been listening to her music.She's touched, if somewhat confused, by the response."The whole thing sounds quite unreal to me," she laughs. "Is that going to make you fight properly?"Maybe you want something else. Like AC/DC."Dido's latest single, No Freedom, is one song that's affected people on the frontline. Although it's a painful story of heartbreak, the refrain: "No freedom without love", has been adopted by rebel groups in Syria."There's even videos now from Syria," she marvels. "It's pretty amazing, I certainly wasn't writing about that."But when you write an intensely personal lyric, the thing that often surprises you is that it's about most things for other people."Like the majority of Dido's forthcoming album, Girl Who Got Away, No Freedom was actually written before the Syrian uprising began in March 2011.She was pregnant at the time with her first son, Stanley, and recorded her vocals right up until the day he was born."There's nothing nicer than singing and having a little dancing friend inside," she says."Certain songs he really wriggled around for, and certain songs he wouldn't - it was quite a good test of what should go on the record."Once Stanley arrived, recording was put on hold. Dido spent the next 18 months going through the same things as every other parent - sleepless nights, acid reflux, and a thorough grounding in CBeebies."My IQ definitely dropped," she says. "I know it's a cliche but your brain just goes, sort of pffftlbt."I'm glad that I'd written the record before my brain fizzled out."Stripped backShowcasing the new songs at a low-key London gig last month, Dido apologised to her record label for "taking so long" - but the truth is that she needs time away from the limelight to develop and nurture her ideas.Instinctively cautious, she frets over lyrics and arrangements, her instinct for simplicity a counterbalance to the kitchen sink approach of her producer (and brother), Rollo."He'll put a tonne of stuff in, and I'll get really angsty and confused because there's too much," she says."So he'll go off and make a cup of tea, and I'll pull all the faders down and start pulling up what I actually remember wanting in there."But having said that, I like to put enough in a song that you want to listen to it again and again. So if you're listening to it on headphones, or in your car, suddenly you'll hear something different."In other words, Dido is playing a sneaky game of deception with her listeners.When you first hear Blackbird, a standout track on the new album, its a pretty, playful song - almost a nursery rhyme. But beneath the surface, its structurally complex and lyrically dark, relaying the story of a man walking out on his family."If I've got a really dark lyric, it's probably disguised in a chirpy song," says the singer. "There's usually a conflict somewhere."To me, that's what makes life interesting - nothing is ever completely as it seems."She breaks her rule just once, on Loveless Hearts - which is as desolate as its chorus: "Did loveless hearts build the world, only to tear it apart?"Dido calls it "my bleakest song ever", written about "a really bad" experience that she couldn't "make sense of".Politely, she declines to explain any further. She "might tell a fan later down the road", but first wants people to relate the story to their own lives."I don't like stifling people's imaginations," she explains. "If I explained everything from the word go, and all the songs related to me - how interesting is that?"Part of her skill is this ability to blend into the background. Critics say it robs her albums of personality - one reviewer likened the last one to "a warm cup of milk" - but fans connect to the songs precisely because they don't have to negotiate the shameless bravado of Lady Gaga or Rihanna.TraumaShe is that rare thing: An unassuming megastar, selling more than 29m records, but able to walk down the high street unmolested when she's off duty."It's weird, the public consciousness," she says, "it just snapped again.""Literally in the last week, I've had a few people coming up and say, 'I really like your new single'. Just out of the blue, and I've not had it for years."I get that thing where people do a double-take because they think I'm an old mate, and then they're mortified."The attention is not unwelcome... unless she's in a department store."Once, I was trying on bikinis, which is the most traumatic thing ever, but once every three years you have to go in and find a new one."The big video screens in the shop went dead and then they started playing my video. I was on every screen on the shop."It was like someone had come along and taken all my clothes off and run away with them."Humiliating changing room nightmares aside, is Dido ready to put family life to one side and step back into the limelight?"I love singing, and I love singing live," she says."It's always better than rehearsing or singing at home. It's a shot of adrenalin that you just can't recreate anywhere else."But there's nothing better for me than the life I've got now. I do music in quite a quiet way. I get to be with my family, with this thing on the side that is exceptional and is amazing."No Freedom is out this week. Girl Who Got Away follows on 4 March.
Ya se conoce la fecha de publicación del videoclip de 'No Freedom', será el próximo lunes 4 de Marzo, el mismo día de la publicación internacional del disco, según ha informado Dido desde su cuenta oficial de Twitter.En otro orden de cosas, mañana Dido aparecerá como invitada en el programa de la televisión inglesa BBC1, BBC Breakfast News. Para quien pueda sintonizar la cadena, Dido saldrá sobre las 8:30 a.m. (hora de UK).
Since her previous work, 2008's Safe Trip Home, the singer-songwriter Dido had her first child. However, she tells Rolling Stone that her fourth studio album, Girl Who Got Away, due March 26th, is definitely not an album about motherhood."All of the album was written before Stanley came along," she says. "I actually thought it was coming much sooner, sort of at the end of 2010, and then I found out was pregnant – which was fantastic – at the end of 2010. There's a whole heap of different flavors on this album, and different emotions, and in a way it sort of covered more ground for me emotionally and musically than any other record I've done, but in quite a simple way."To get those flavors, she worked with a variety of collaborators – some familiar, like her brother Rollo (from the band Faithless) and Brian Eno, and some new, including Kendrick Lamar. Dido says the Lamar collaboration, "Let Us Move On," came about from the involvement of Jeff Bhasker, who's enjoyed a lot of recent success with the band Fun. However, it was Bhasker's work on another record that attracted Dido's attention."I'm a big Kanye West fan. I think he's great. I'd love to do a track with him one day," she says. "That 808s [& Heartbreak] album I just love. I just thought that was a great record. That's one of the reasons that I wanted to work with Jeff Bhasker."Dido is a big believer in bringing new blood into her circle of music. "You always learn something more, and it makes the music and songs more exciting," she says. "I wouldn't have written a song like 'End of Night' with Rollo. I like that variety. That's what gave No Angel a lot of its variety – working with different people at different times."Yet she absolutely understands the value of long-term relationships and familiarity. Case in point: she calls the most autobiographical song on the record one she didn't even write the lyrics to. "'Sitting on the Roof of the World' is actually written by my brother, but it just feels so relevant to me," she says. "I think that's the beauty of working with Rollo. He's the only other person who's ever written lyrics for my stuff, 'cause it sort of feels like this extension of my brain . . . I get really nicely surprised by his lyrics. I might sing them one way at first, thinking they're about this, and then suddenly it'll become about something else."While the new songs predate the birth of Stanley, she admits that she now hears them differently after having a son. "A song like 'No Freedom,' for instance, on this record, was written about one thing, and then since Stanley was born I listened to it with fresh ears, in a way, and it sort of becomes about something different, which I love. I always feel pleased if a song does change meaning in that way, because I feel like I've written a good song," she says with a laugh.Right now Dido has no confirmed U.S. tour dates, but if she does make it Stateside, she is looking forward to exploring with her son. "What's great now is I can do a whole heap of things again, and sort of seeing them through Stanley's eyes makes it completely fresh. You get the glorious Technicolor version of things you've seen before, and they look even better when you see them through his eyes," she says.Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/dido-greets-motherhood-with-girl-who-got-away-20130301#ixzz2MOtvNaa9
Dido: 'Im bad at buying things, once I crashed a new car the first time took it out''White Flag' singer-songwriter Dido has admitted that she tends not to spend in extravagant ways because an unfortunate incident with a car showed her that money can go to waste easily.Speaking about her history of expensive purchases, Dido explained that on top of buying a vehicle because it had a pretty colour scheme she also got herself a car that she crashed into a wall the first time she drove it:"I'm not very good on purchases. A few years ago I bought a car because the interior was the same colour as my No Angel Cd - red and black. That's a girl reason for buying a car."Then I made the mistake of buying another car, which I hated and managed to drive into a wall the first time I went out in it, writing it off in the process. That taught me about keeping it simple."
Dido está muy contenta con las opiniones sobre su disco, que son todas muy positivas. Por eso ha organizado una fiesta conjunta para escuchar el disco a la vez que responde preguntas de los fans a travíés de su twitter oficial: https://twitter.com/didoofficial.Si quieres unirte la cita es el Jueves 7 a las 2:30 p.m. (hora de UK).
