Safe Trip Home

Product Description This deluxe edition includes an additional CD with bonus tracks and 4 Dido postcards. About the Artist Safe Trip Home is the warm, moving, and wonderfully musical third album from Dido, the London-born singer-songwriter with the cracked-crystal voice. The first, you might remember, was No Angel, a record made when Dido was a part-time backing singer with a tiny budget and no label. When that record's heartfelt snap-shots of life were released in 1999, nobody, least of all Dido, expected the album to eventually become the planet's biggest seller of 2001. The similarly affecting follow-up, 2003's Life For Rent, also burrowed its way into millions of hearts, hitting number one in 26 countries and lighting up the airwaves in many more. By the time Dido had toured that record around the world, she was ready for a bit of a breather. "It was a whirlwind," she says. "When I got back from touring early in 2005, it took a while just to take in what had happened. I was so unprepared for it. As far as I was concerned I was making this little underground record for me to listen to and then, suddenly, eight years later I was getting off this incredible speeding train. I'd had an amazing time, but I guess I needed to take a step back, reconnect with normal life and bring the focus 100 percent back to music." Although she disappeared from view, Dido took very little time off from music. However, rather than immediately starting to write new songs, she threw herself into playing, whether it be her music or others people's. "I wanted to take some time to become a better musician," she explains. "For the first two albums, any playing I'd done had been used purely for songwriting, which is very different from just playing for fun, like I had as a child. So I spent a lot of time just picking up instruments for playing's sake again. I loved it." Dido had inadvertently set the tone for Safe Trip Home, a record whose smouldering, soulful songs were to eventually feature her playing guitar, piano, bells and the trusty old recorder she'd toured Europe with as a prodigious pupil of London's Guildhall School of Music. She's even responsible for some of the album's drums (most notably on the sumptuously melancholy Quiet Times). When Dido met up with producer, Jon Brion (Fiona Apple, Kayne West, Rufus Wainwright, Eels) at London's Abbey Road studios towards the end of 2005, he was blown away by her musicianship. "I realised she had this beautiful feel for playing from the first day I met her," he says. "In fact, if there's anything I'm particularly proud of with this record, it's encouraging Dido to play more instruments. When she plays drums, her groove is magnificent. And her touch on piano is absolutely stunning." "Jon persuaded me to go out to LA and do some writing," says Dido. "We had this brilliant few weeks working together. It felt like I could try anything I wanted, with whatever instrument I wanted. That was really the start of the album." Songs like the sensuous "Never Want To Say It's Love" and the string-soaked "Let’s Do the Things We Normally Do" were two of several tracks to emerge from those productive sessions. Buoyed by that initial progress, Dido decided to relocate to LA for a while to continue working with Brion on the album. It was a city ripe with opportunities, whether that be the potential for long drives into the desert listening to music, the amazing vocal sound in Brion's broom cupboard, the chance to get Citizen Cope in to sing on the gorgeous Burnin Love, or the fact that Dido's favourite drummer Mick Fleetwood was on hand to play on Grafton Street, the plaintive album highlight she'd written with another inspiration, Brian Eno. "I wasn't actually a big fan of LA before," she admits, "but it turned out to be an amazing place to follow through an idea and keep going without anyone saying you're being completely ridiculous. It's a city built on imagination, story-telling and creativity. Plus, everyone seems to go to bed at 9 p.m., so I'd get a lot done at night." Dido's musical experimentation also extended to learning more about the actual mechanics of recording. "I was very impressed by that," says Brion. "It would be a very easy life for her to allow people to make stuff for her to sing on and I think it's more than a little bit admirable that she is so inquisitive about everything. She learned a ton about engineering, about arranging, about mastering, about the construction of music. She even went and took some music courses at UCLA. This is not the thing the average person who's just looking to crank it out does." Indeed, rather than rushing to get the album done, Dido was happy to take her time. "I didn't really feel any urgency to stop writing," she says. "In fact, when I'd finished all the stuff with Jon in LA, I came back to England and realised I really wanted to start using all the things I'd learned there. So I sat down at my kitchen table with my laptop and a micr
ASIN: B001GJ3VYG
VSKU: DBV.B001GJ3VYG.G
Condition: Good
Author/Artist:Dido
Binding: Audio cd
Note: Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.
Condition Notes: Individually inspected: Guaranteed to play perfectly or your money back. Case may show wear and may be in library packaging. Ships Fast!