Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong, better known as Dido, returns with a new album on March 26, her first since 2008″s “Safe Trip Home.”
The British singer/songwriter, whose feathery, lilting vocals have highlighted such hits as “White Flag” and “Thank You” (widely known for its use in Eminem’s “Stan”) recorded much of “Girl Who Got Away” while pregnant with her son, Stanley, who was born in 2011.
Like most new moms, she”s seeing the world differently these days. “Having a child just changes everything in the most amazing way and there”s just a freshness to life and I see everything through his eyes and it just sort of blows away anything,” she says. “Suddenly the whole world is technicolor again and it feels like starting again in the best way.”
Because she recorded the album leisurely, she says she didn”t feel the sort of pressure she”s had on past albums. “I made this album sort of over a period of time and each track was made in its own time,” she says. “It wasn”t like we were in a studio having to sort of do a bunch of stuff. It was a track here, a track there, and I came to LA and I worked with a few people and it just meant that the album naturally built up. By the time we came to putting it all together at the end of last year, I know it was already there, the pressure was off.”
One of the people on the new album is Kendrick Lamar, with whom she recorded the gorgeous “Let Us Move On.” “I wrote the track with Jeff Bhasker and that was just a really, fun day. I”d always wanted to work with him,” she says. “[The song] needed a rap on it, you could just feel on it, it needed an extra story. I loved what I”d heard of Kendrick”s voice, so I sent it to him and he sent back this amazing rap and it was just to hear his voice, it was like, ‘Oh, this is great, I love this!”” She and the Lamar still have yet to meet.
In addition to Bhasker and Lamar, she work with a number of other top producers and songwriters, including Greg Kurstin, Rick Nowels, her brother Rollo Armstrong, and Brian Eno.
In the embedded video, the Londoner also talks about why she finds Southern California so inspirational and how her Oscar nomination for “If I Rise” affected her.