Andrew Bird

Andrew Bird
The Words & Whistlings of an Indie Iconoclast
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Knoxville Voice, September 2007



Lanky, brooding, and dressed to the nines, Andrew Bird is every bit the eccentric sophisticate—a classically trained violinist with a penchant for gypsy folk balladry. He can alternately project the spastic strangeness of David Byrne and the streetwise cool of Tom Waits, but he doesn’t sound anything like either of them. In fact, Bird’s music bares little immediate resemblance to much of anything in the pop landscape, including his supposed singer/songwriter brethren in the indie scene-- Rufus Wainwright, Sufjan Stevens, or the late Jeff Buckley. Such pigeonholing comparisons come as lazily as ornithological puns, and are (tongue planted firmly in beak) hardly befitting a colorful Bird such as this one.

“I’ve always been coming from a different world,” Bird, 34, admits. He’s speaking softly via telephone from his Chicago home. “For years, I felt outside of what was called indie rock, and now I seem to be accepted by that. It’s like crossing pathways in a way. A lot of punk rock or indie bands seem to be going in the direction-- as they get older-- of refining their music or maybe trying to get into more adult music, and I think I’m kind of going in the other direction. I came from this classical world where there is a certain disconnect from the audience, and you’re playing Shostakovich. I really wanted to go toward a more basic, elemental music.”

This desire led a young Andrew Bird out of the conservatory and into a whole new world of early jazz, folk, blues, and world influences. For a while, he landed a recurring role as a guest violinist with the retro swing band, the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and by the late 1990’s, the melodies of old jazzmen like Lester Young and Johnny Hodges had slid alongside Bach and Bartok in his subconscious. It was a strange brew that began manifesting itself on the three albums Bird recorded with his first band, The Bowl of Fire. Critics were impressed, but the buzz didn’t really get going until Bird flew solo on 2003’s Weather Systems, a more pop-oriented record that he had developed while living on a farm outside of Chicago. For many artists, this would have marked the perfect occasion to make the inevitable move to New York or L.A., but Bird has remained quite satisfied with the quieter, Midwestern life.

“I’ve got a nice setup in Chicago,” he says, “because I’ve got the city and the country. If I moved to a coast, it might be an exciting environment, but it’s not always going to offer the space to let ideas diffuse themselves a little bit. Sometimes you need that isolation.”

Bird followed Weather Systems with two more eclectic, otherworldly albums—2005’s Mysterious Production of Eggs and this year’s widely acclaimed Armchair Apocrypha—which finds Bird further developing his mellow mix of carefully layered violin plucking, jazzy guitar strumming, and feathery-voiced beat poetry. It’s unorthodox, sometimes sneakily dramatic, but most assuredly "pop" in terms of its melodicism and hummability. It's also probably the best thing he has ever done, though Bird is hardly eager to hitch himself to such a notion.

“All I know is, when I go from one record to the next, is that whatever worked before isn’t going to work this time,” he says. “It’s definitely not a linear progression towards something better than what preceded it. I’m not in the process of getting better at writing songs, because there never really is a right formula for it.”

As Bird’s famously unpredictable live shows prove, he is not usually very keen on linear thinking. His past songs, including those on the new record, are essentially living organisms for him to modify and adapt on a whim—whether it’s swirling in a new violin loop, or perhaps whistling an entire verse. He views lyrics in a similarly adventurous manner, which is pretty obvious from song titles like “Sovay,” Plasticities,” and “Imitosis.”

“I almost think of myself as an instrumentalist who happens to use words,” Bird says. “So that kind of frees me up with the words in a way, where I can bat them around and disrespect them a little bit. It’s really a fascinating and mysterious thing to me-- where words come from-- not so much where intellectual ideas come from. Sometimes words behave the same way that melodies do. If I fixate enough on a word that I don’t know the definition of, it can actually become more meaningful sometimes. It might be a word like apocrypha, or other words where either I don’t know what they are, or nobody really knows what the actual meaning is. Like sovay, for instance, is an ancient word that’s not in use anymore, so we can ascribe it new meaning. Those kind of things get me going.”

Though he’s been accompanied by the talented pair of drummer Martin Dosh and multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Vlvisaker on the Armchair Apocrypha tour, Bird built much of his reputation from his memorable solo shows, during which he would layer loops of violin, glockenspiel, and guitar over one another-- mad scientist style. In recent years, he’s even added a slightly more organic sound—his own whistling—as a key ingredient in the mix.

“It’s such a casual instrument,” Bird says, “but it’s also intimate. You know, I’m used to instruments being really hard to play, so it took me forever to realize that it’s OK to use one that’s almost subconscious and really easy for me. When I finally started whistling on stage a couple years ago, I realized it actually had a lot of power.”

Still, like any good songbird, Andrew Bird admits he doesn’t always know when to put his whistling to rest.

“If you were out with me for a day, it would probably drive you nuts,” he laughs.