Andrew Bird
Getting Inside With His Feathers And Leaving A Yellow Glowing Glow Behind
Oct 29, 2007
Words by Sean Moller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound Engineering by Patrick Stolley
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Fiery Crash
original version appears on Armchair Apocrypha
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Lull
original version appears on Weather Systems
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A Breaks B
original version appears on Unreleased Dianogah song
Well, it's a song that we worked on for a long time. Jay came up with his main part and we all really liked it and we went through many different ideas before ending up with a complete song. I started to say final, but I'm not sure it's totally done yet. I think we worked on it off and on for something like five years. Not that the result is a masterpiece...it just took a long time to come up with something that we felt was worthy of the original part Jay wrote. I'm still not sure that we did the part justice. Hopefully when we finally nail something down for the album it'll feel like we came up with something good. In regards to meanings...I'm not sure we ever try to ascribe our instrumental songs (which are most of our songs) with specific meaning. It's more about the feeling you get when you listen to it. Hopefully instrumental music can touch people the same way that songs with words can...at least that's the goal. The listener has to give it some meaning. It will be on our next album, which will be out on Southern Records in May of next year.
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Plasticities
original version appears on Armchair Apocrypha
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The Giant of Illinois
Unreleased
Downloads for *The Giant of Illinois* were capped at 2500.
There's a farmhouse somewhere out amongst the harvested, chewed up and spit out corn and soybean stalks and stems just an hour north of here, near the tri-state area of northwestern Illinois, where Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin meet, with Andrew Bird's name on it. It's a place better left to the imagination. It sits, as far as anyone knows, in the general vicinity of Galena, a tiny little burg with a small river running through it and a once upon a time preponderance of Civil War generals calling it home. By the end of the war, nine of them lived in the city - including Ulysses S. Grant - and dinner guests and visitors such as Susan B. Anthony would pull into town in carriages, spending time in the valley, surrounded by massive, old trees.
Herman Melville lived there, a place where you can become - still to this day - invisible next to the handmade treats of the confectionaries, the wineries, the nonchalance, the bed and breakfasts, the Moleskine notebooks and the rural spacing. It's the place where Bird, the whistler, the philosopher, the magician, the man of mystery, should stake out a residency.
It should be where he buys his milk, hard boils his eggs, wiles his days and conceptualizes these songs of otherworldly opulence. It should be where he receives his mail. He should be sharing pithy comments with that mailman, on a sun-drenched porch, as he hands over the super saver coupons, energy bill and that week's New Yorker or something just as high brow, maybe our favorite, The Believer.
The homestead, as we believe it to be, has a detached garage, a pump house, a wide open lawn that would take an hour to push mow, some grandly hanging maple trees, a garden rife with caterpillars and rabbits, and a half mile to the next house. It should be on a gravel road, tucked so comfortably into the countryside, but it doesn't have to be. The house itself is probably warm, smells like burnt wood and feels as if you could be happy forever inside of it, never leaving, just reading the hardbound books on its shelves.
Bird and his music lend themselves to a myriad of postulations and elaborate ideas about where his music is first cradled and babied, where it's nursed and doctored. From all that can be determined through it, Bird belongs to no known stratum, but a subtext that isn't prone to easy answers. He does sneaky things with a violin and guitar. He can make his mouth and voice do impressive contortions, and all the while listening to him, you will find yourself not blinking or breathing much, just enough to get by until the next break in song.
He writes something funny below when he talks about the rural Midwest being a sleeper. He's kind of a sleeper himself, this one Andrew Bird. He makes songs that positively have wings on them - huge Big Bird wings - with massive wind-grabbing feathers that allow the songs to rise and rise and rise and then just glide down on the pockets of blue wind, just as the beady-eyed hawks do out along the road ditches near his home, looking to poach some slithery field mice below.
His latest album, Armchair Apocrypha, is all rubies and diamonds, pleasing in its cuts and refractions. It continues with his mission to make the smartest, most dressed up mists of shrewd lightning bolts - they strike you right in the temple and turn you all yellow on the inside, while leaving your outer sides the same as they always were. It's a better experience than the one that usually happens with a song, where the outside is all that's affected.
Click here to visit Andrew Bird's myspace page.
