Andrew Bird

Chicago’s own musical polymath Andrew Bird is the quintessential word-of-mouth artist. His music, which draws elements from pop, classical, jazz, and folk traditions, defies easy genre categorization, and his modest Midwestern persona is amiable, but not striking. A “next big thing” he is not. Yet his name has been quietly buzzing in taste-making music circles for years, with each new release quietly building on the sleeper success of the last. Bird reached a new peak in 2007 with Armchair Apocrypha, a name-making album that landed him on many year-end best-of lists and attracted more than 13,000 fans to a homecoming show at Millennium Park in the fall of 2008. Immediately following Armchair’s rigorous tour, which saw Bird playing 150 to 200 shows a year, he returned to the studio to write and record the new Noble Beast. The momentum seems to be working: The new album, out today, is his most accessible yet, a collection of straightforward (relatively speaking), melodic tunes—bolstered, as always, by Bird’s signature whistling and violin flourishes—that foreshadows yet another quiet breakthrough. The A.V. Club spoke with Bird as he prepared to unleash Beast. (For more, check out a recap of Bird's Beast-full performance at the Hancock Observatory.)

The A.V. Club: Did you write the new album while you were touring?
Andrew Bird: I finished touring the last record in February and I started recording this one in March. So I never really left the bubble, if you will, which is I think a good thing. I was just very focused. But I had this idea of making it more leisurely. A château in southern France with good food and take long lunch breaks, but it just doesn’t work that way. It’s like you don’t know you’re making a record unless you’re half-killing yourself. Then Wilco offered their space right around that time, and I was like, “Great. Can’t turn that down. Let’s get right to work.” So Jeremy came down, and we made some demos. Just kind of rough sketches of the songs. And we sent them to Dosh in Minneapolis and he, you know, puts his kids to bed and then stays up all night making loops. So he made a loop for every demo with, like, kids toys and found sounds. That’s where he’s most creative, not sitting at a drum set in a studio. Then we took those percussion tracks and went to Nashville. I played an old Martin guitar. Jeremy played a Hummingbird. We just, you know, tried to get really great vocal pieces. So then we just have this vocal and guitar, and we took that back to the Wilco loft, brought Martin down to play drums. It’s kind of unusual to add drums. You usually add vocal last, but we were just trying to make the song sound really beautiful without any of that stuff. And then try not to screw it up.
AVC: You saw a big profile jump after Armchair: You sold a lot more records and you’re playing bigger venues. Do you think any of that influenced the new one? Were you composing with a bigger audience in mind?
AB: Not at all. When it was over, I was like, “Wow. This is as weird a record I’ve ever made.” I mean, I have some irrepressible pop impulses to write an appealing, concise song. And I also have some irrepressible kind of restlessness as well, and I need to keep myself interested. When I’m left to my own devices, there’s a struggle. Like a song like “Fitz And The Dizzy Spells,” because you know it wants to be this pop song, but it has so many digressions in it. You know, so many linear sections. There’s always that struggle between me wanting to keep it new and fresh and then be—I can never get with pop songs being so repetitive.
AVC: Do you think you have a repressed impulse to write a straight-ahead pop song? Is that something that you’d ever want to experiment with?
AB: I think I already do, yeah. It’s not that it’s repressed. I’m coming from a place that’s more experimental and indulgent already, so for the last 10 years it’s been more like, how can I defend my own sensibilities by writing a nugget of a little catchy pop song? That’s how I’m stretching myself, by writing something really simple.
AVC: But then you talk about taking it in directions where it doesn’t necessarily want to go. In the blog you did for the New York Times about the process of recording Noble Beast, you talk about sometimes taking a song that seems to want to go in a certain direction and forcing it a different way to see where you can take it.
AB: Sometimes I think I don’t have much choice in the matter. It’s just what happens and I’m following my instincts the whole time. I just pay attention to what’s in my head. That’s my No. 1 rule. If something gets under my own skin, and keeps reoccurring, it starts to take on a certain weight and value, and I think, “I have to put this in the song. I have no choice but to mention Greek Cypriots in this song.”
AVC: Do lyrics take a bit more work for you? Or maybe you tend to concentrate on it more, where as melodies are more instinctual.
AB: Yeah. The melodies come out so strong that I’m like, “Oh, crap.” It’s really better if they could both be kind of able to compromise, but the melodies, even more recently, they come out very fully cast and formed. So you’ve got one things that’s fixed and another thing that’s sort of has to accommodate the melody. Like “Natural Disasters,” that melody came out fully formed and I thought it would just have to be an instrumental, because the only thing I could think of to sing was “I’m the one who sank the Lusitania,” but it fit perfectly in the shape of the melody. It’s like, [sings] “I’m the one who sank the Lusitania.” And that just popped into my head. And I’m like, oh, crap, how do I write another—you know, I still have 90 percent of the song to write. I start with something like that. So I had to scrap that and start over, and that song took me a good two or three years to finish out.
AVC: So it sounds like you’re more concerned with the way words sound more than what they mean.
AB: Yeah, but there’s a reason certain words occur to you. And you spend a lot of time trying to pull meaning out of these things. It’s not completely random. Thus, there is a reason I couldn’t work with “I’m the one who sank the Lusitania.” That’s like evidence that it’s not completely arbitrary. There are some songs that are quite pointed from beginning to end, you know. In the case of that, though, I do feel under a lot of pressure. Like, “Oh this is such a lovely, sweet, simple melody. How can I write something that’s going to do justice to the melody?” Melodies are just honest. They can only be what they are. Words have the capacity for deception. They’re all full of subtext, and some of them are cliché and overused and vernacular. They’re tricky. All I can say is words are tricky… And I’m into lately being a little less precious about writing and being like, “Okay, what if I just locked myself in my room, pretend that there’s someone outside with a gun that’s saying, ‘Don’t come out until you write something.’” And I’ve had a few situations lately where I’ve had to write something really, really fast, for like a film thing or something. And I think, “Sure, I could do that.” And I just stay up all night. I did that with “Imitosis.” I had to re-write the chorus because of an issue with Sesame Street. The original chorus said, “We all live in a capital I,” which is from that cartoon in Sesame Street. And the lawyers finally said, “Sorry, you can’t do it.” And I couldn’t even do it under the radar because they knew, and I was like, “Aw, crap. I’ve been working on this song for four years.” And instead of getting depressed I just stayed up all night, and I wrote the whole line about mitosis.
AVC: And you just stuck the I on as an homage?
AB: Yeah, as an homage to “Capital I.” Just because you’re under the gun like that doesn’t mean you’re going to write anything of less quality, necessarily.
AVC: Or that if you spend four years on something that it’s going to be better.
AB: Exactly. I mean, “Palindromes” was written and recorded within four days. Whereas “Measuring Cups” took four years and seven or eight recordings. And then a trip to the Garfield Park Conservatory, I was in the one area and they had a lot of anthurium, and I thought, “That’s a cool word.”  But “lacrimae,” I just made that up. It just sounded good.
AVC: What do you think it means?
AB: I kinda use that one a lot. Like “lachrymose,” “macramé,” mixing the two together. I do that sometimes, take one word and cram it against another, like “nauseausalation.” Nau-seus-a-lation. Or “tenuousness.” It’s very onomatopoeic, like a decaying rope bridge across a canyon: ten-u-ous-ness.

Video for "Imitosis":