Making sense of Denver’s Paper Bird

Word to those uninitiated into the ways of Denver’s Paper Bird: The band’s idiosyncratic blend of bluegrass, jazz, and Americana may just stump you the first time you see the seven-member group take the stage. Don’t freak out. It’s kind of the expected response to an act you can’t really fit into that nicely ordered musical taxonomy you’ve spent your life so carefully constructing. “People tell us that when they hear us start playing, they’re not really sure what we’re trying to get across,” explains bassist Macon Terry. “But by the end of the show, they realize they can just have a good time. They don’t need a word to describe us.”

Since releasing its debut, 2007’s Anything Nameless And Joymaking, Paper Bird’s become a staple in Colorado acoustic music circles, landing plaudits from all sorts of local critics and even landing a spotlight piece on NPR’s All Things Considered. No wonder, either: The act’s vibrant blend of bluegrass banjo, roots-rock guitar, and vocal harmonies provided by its double-barreled team of frontwomen/sisters, Esme and Genevieve Patterson, is as inventive as it is difficult to cram into the limits of the contemporary musical lexicon.

The new When The River Took Flight, released this past weekend, has been a long time coming for fans. Recorded last year with Robert Ferbrache, five of the tracks made their debut on the A Sky Underground EP, just as Paper Bird decided it wasn’t 100 percent on the final form the songs took. The songs were pulled apart, remixed and remastered with fresh set of ears (those of John McVey), and finally polished up enough to earn the band’s seal of approval. It’s been a heck of a long wait for fans, and nobody’s quite as disturbed by that as the members of Paper Bird. “For the past year, we’ve been really uncomfortable about sitting on these songs for so long,” Terry says. “It feels like we’ve been shelved by a higher power. It hasn’t been a tortuous process, but it is really nice to look back and see we could give all the songs their full potential.”