Safe Trip Home

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About Safe Trip Home

Amazon.com (Amazon.co.uk Review) Safe Trip Home, the third album from singer-songwriter Dido, sees the chanteuse cook up a slightly different ambience than on previous albums No Angel (1999) and Life for Rent (2003). Though her signature elements remain in place--the limited, slightly cracked falsetto; the dreamy, comforting trip-hop vibe--there seems to be an extra density to Safe Trip Home, doubtless provoked by the loss of her father in 2006. The added weight is predominantly in the lyrics, which tend to focus on loss and heartache, but there's extra detail and depth in the musicianship too, since Dido has been busy honing her skills as a multi-instrumentalist. Despite the denser themes, the music still drifts by in classic Dido style, moving smoothly through the insouciant “Don't Believe in Love", the aptly titled “Quiet Times", and “Never Want to Say It's Love", before arriving at the somber-yet-elegant six-minute standout “Grafton Street", co-written with Brian Eno and featuring Mick Fleetwood on drums. The rest of the album unfurls in similarly sophicticated fashion, featuring the folkish “Look No Further", the upbeat “Us 2 Little Gods", and a nine-minute poetic closer called “Northern Skies". Put simply, Safe Trip Home is Dido in superlative form. --Danny McKenna Product description Safe Trip Home Dido Label: Arista Release Date: 11/18/2008 1 Don't Believe in Love - 3:52 2 Quiet Times - 3:17 3 Never Want to Say It's Love - 3:35 4 Grafton Street - 5:57 5 It Comes and It Goes - 3:27 6 Look No Further - 3:13 7 Us 2 Little Gods - 4:49 8 The Day Before the Day - 4:13 9 Let's Do the Things We Normally Do - 4:09 10 Burnin Love - 4:11 11 Northern Skies - 8:55 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