London-based best-selling award-winning novelist Louisa Young is releasing YOU LEFT EARLY, her debut album as a singer/songwriter, to coincide with the publication by Harper Collins of her much-heralded ‘brutal, beautiful’ memoir YOU LEFT EARLY: A TRUE STORY OF LOVE AND ALCOHOL, in summer 2018. Louisa has come together with Corinthians frontman and Wooden Arms member Alex Mackenzie (arranger, producer, multi-instrumentalist, until recently her daughter’s boyfriend) to form BIRDS of BRITAIN, and record an album of world-weary, heartbreaking songs about love, addiction, death and loss, based on her loss of her fianc?, the composer Robert Lockhart, a prodigy and alcoholic who died in 2012. Cracked vocals, space-washed electronica, country-inflected harmonies, rainstorms, cello, violin and bitter weeping guitar contribute to a late-night air. These are grown-up songs from a grown-up; midnight cabaret songs written on your dead man’s grand piano, beautifully lyricked gin-and-razorblade songs for those who’ve been round the block. If Nico or Marianne Faithfull had been widowed; if Leonard Cohen had been an Englishwoman, if Anthony & the Johnsons was doing a slow waltz with the Jesus and Mary Chain, with Hank and Lucinda Williams crying in the corner... Johnny Cash: ‘Louisa, you gotta be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it.’ Sir Ray Davies: ‘That’s a good song. You sound a bit like Nico.
