Ahead of the Only Love album and tour from Dan Whitehouse, we take an exclusive peek at a stripped back take on Bird Of Paradise.
Bird Of Paradise, a stripped-back piano-and-vocal single recorded live with pianist David O’Brien, without overdubs arrives ahead of his new album Only Love, out on 16th October.
“We wanted to dig deep and describe the mixed emotions that must lie behind that world,” says Dan Whitehouse. “The brief relief, the unavoidable pathos, the frayed edges of the whole thing.”
Co-written with longtime collaborator Jason Tarver during a songwriting retreat at Tarver’s rural studio near Barcelona, Bird Of Paradise began life as a flower: the Strelitzia (or Bird of Paradise) – exotic, sensual and impossible to ignore. Their conversation turned from botanical beauty to the ways beauty itself is commodified, with Tarver pointing to Tina Turner’s Private Dancer as a touchstone.
From that came a fictional first-person encounter that looks beyond the transaction to the person inside it: desire, shame, vulnerability, brief relief and the emptiness that follows. Rather than sensationalising the setting, the song stays with the recognisably human urge beneath it – to be seen, touched and wanted. The stark version in the most intimate of forms.
That instinct to strip things back, both musically and emotionally, runs through the wider album, Only Love. Bird Of Paradise turns toward desire and transactional intimacy while elsewhere, the record explores the different distance of long-distance fatherhood, as Whitehouse works to stay present in his young son’s life across the UK-Japan divide. Recorded live with pianist David O’Brien, with no overdubs and no safety net, the LP is an intimate exploration of connection, absence and return.
Dan Whitehouse: Website