Janie Price aka BIRD is as much half-and-half as any dairy product you might stir into a coffee. Start with her given and aka names, then her half English, half Irish heritage, calling home in either London or Florence, Italy, singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, documentary filmmaker and recording artist. “I’m really a Londoner with a Celt accent,” she said, although that accounts for only the beginning of her story. Perhaps this duality is the inverse of Greta Garbo’s sentiment about wanting to be left alone. BIRD doesn’t even like being labeled a solo artist. “I don’t like the term,” she asserted. “I feel like this is a project that I have, and talented friends and colleagues join me along the way, in the studio, writing or playing live on stage.”
Mentioning the stage, at age 15 she was the youngest ever female drummer to perform a headline show at the legendary Marquee Club in London. She was also the youngest member of an all-girl rock band called Mustang Sally. When one of the other band members mentioned her age while giving her props for a great drum solo, the club owner immediately regretted serving her a shandy. Before learning the drums, however, she was trained on the cello from age 6, joined the local youth orchestra and the best was yet to come. In an interview, she stated: “I started art college to study as a graphic designer but quit after I had a bad experience with a teacher. I moved out of home and needed money for rent, so a friend recommended me for a job in the kitchen of a residential recording studio in central London. I was basically washing dishes until one day I overheard a cellist hadn’t turned up for a recording session. I told them I could play; they luckily believed me, and that was the start of my career as a session musician.”
Her music is a combination of folk and pop with a few other genres thrown in from song to song. Price’s parents listened to Gordon Lightfoot, and on holiday in Belgium with her dad she heard a Michael Jackson song in a restaurant and began dancing madly, so striking that the owner gifted her with the cassette. All grown up, she has recorded several albums and in 2025, the EP Heads or Tales, which included a cover of The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” and “Roy” about the late great Roy Orbison, the subject of her second short film, a documentary called You Found a Friend in Elvis, which will also be her directorial debut. Singles are coming out in anticipation of the next EP, one a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” to be released on her Pop Fiction label in 2026.
Price recorded the video while on tour at the Hotel du Vin in Bristol. They lent their wine cellar for the project. She is playing “a not particularly fancy cello” and is accompanied by her guitarist Pete Rinaldi, who is playing a Yairi WY-1 Bob Weir Signature model guitar (that is likely quite fancy). Rinaldi is originally from Perth, Australia but lives in London and once played in a band called One Eskimo. “When he’s not working with me,” Price says, “he’s playing for Dido, Gareth Gates and ABC, but obviously I’m his favourite, hahaha.”
BIRD’s exclusive AUK mini-gig is waiting for you to press play. Notes on the songs by the artist are below. And for finding out about all her many projects, activities, release dates and who knows what else, go to her website, Facebook, X and Instagram.
1. The Tides: I wrote this while rolling around feeling seasick in the bottom of a sailing boat I didn’t want to be on:) The lyrics sat waiting in a book until I was in L.A. writing with John Paul White (The Civil Wars), who is an old friend and colleague. He started playing that opening guitar riff, jamming around, and I was like, I have the perfect lyric for that. We put the ideas together and had the song down in about two hours. Sometimes it’s like that – words and a melody sitting inside two people’s heads just waiting for the universe to glue them together.
2. The Film: I wrote this by myself during the first Covid lockdown. The world felt like a very strange place. I was stuck in Italy and had nothing with me but a change of clothes and anything I could order from Amazon. So, I bought a small keyboard, a ukelele and a desk mic, and that’s how this song was written. The final recorded vocal is actually the original lockdown scratch vocal. It just had so much character to it, which I never could recreate. That song is a real moment caught in time for me.
3. The Exorcist: This song is part of an album I have yet to release. I wrote it with my dear friend Hal Lindes, who was one of the guitarists in Dire Straits in the ’80s. The first time I met him we were introduced through a friend because Hal was looking for a lyricist for a project. He came to my little flat in London, all L.A. tan and aviator sunglasses – a proper rock star. But he’s also the sweetest guy, and it was a total honour getting to write with him.
