More empathetic than incendiary, this is still Andrew Bird’s Finest Work Yet
Andrew Bird’s My Finest Work Yet is as much a culmination of his musical storytelling as it is a high mark of his 20-plus year career—you can walk away with a different favorite song with each listen. The album, Bird’s 12th solo outing, is replete with superlatives, containing some of his most exquisite melodies and finest wordplay, as well as his lushest, warmest sound yet. The latter is a pinnacle achieved through live vocals, mainly from Bird and Madison Cunningham, and recording sessions sans headphones or separations.
As Bird himself has indicated, My Finest Work Yet also features some of his most overtly political songs, including “Bloodless,” which was written in the time between the 2016 federal election and the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville. But while there is a greater sense of urgency to the album’s themes, we can still count on Bird to eschew heavy-handed references to the latest tweetstorm or diplomatic crisis. His signature playfulness, which immediately greets listeners old and new via the album’s cheeky title, continues to yield incisive turns of phrase. On the enervating “Fallorun,” Bird calls out a certain narcissistic leader’s campaigning for recognition in Time magazine—“Such an abomination / Could be the man of the year”—and the surrender of casual activists (“We could’ve been together / But you couldn’t stand the weather here”) while never once invoking hashtag resistance terms.