Safe Trip Home

'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.

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").

Dido's softly-expressed thoughts, parables, feelings, hopes and concerns flow unfettered from 'Safe Trip Home'. It is a record of love and loss, strength and surrender, highs and lows. And, as with her previous two albums, Dido shows an astonishing knack for extracting life's universals from its little details.