Speaking in tongues with Andrew Bird
Singer-songwriter multi instrumentalist Andrew Bird on “the reckoning” of returning home from the road, songwriting as a form of “speaking in tongues" and the upside of obscurity.
Andrew Bird has been searching for meaning in sound since he was a young boy growing up outside of Chicago, learning to play violin. He got a degree in violin performance from Northwestern University in 1996, and although his college training set him up for a career in music, it also disoriented him. He was at home playing classical and folk music, he loved rock & roll, and listening to jazz piano trio recordings from the 50s.
Specifically the sound of recordings made by the legendary jazz engineer Rudy Van Gelder were defining for Andrew. Something about the way those records made him feel stayed with him from the very beginning.
He released his first record Music of Hair right after graduating. It showcased his singing and his violin skills, and paid tribute to his fascination with both American and European folk traditions.
That same year, the movie Swingers came out, and jump, jive, and swing music was having a moment all over the country. In Chicago, the swing scene was alive and kicking at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge where the Mighty Blue Kings held court every week.
So it was probably inevitable that an open minded musician like Bird who loved all kinds of music, would end up in that scene. After working with the North Carolina band Squirrel Nut Zippers for a few years in the late 90s, he started Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire and got busy mining the past in order to find a way forward.
For Andrew, the sound of the Bowl of Fire recordings was as important as the music itself, and he was determined to record in the old fashioned way, setting up the band in front of only a few vintage microphones and balancing the sound live in the room. “I was just trying to blow out the microphones like those old recordings,” he remembers.
Although that diligence appeared to be paying off, he felt increasingly uneasy about being what he calls “a lifestyle accoutrement.” He didn’t necessarily want to play music for swing dancing. But it wasn’t clear to him what exactly he did want. The curse of the open minded, adaptable musician is to be in constant pursuit of something just outside of the frame.
“I was so used to going into situations and figuring out what the situation wants instead of what I really want from the top down. So it took a few more years, an extreme environment change and a lot of isolation to figure out what my point of view was.”
So in 2002 Bird left the jump and jive of his Chicago life for the pastoral simplicity of a converted barn in Western Illinois set himself up in a kind of creative isolation and self imposed austerity. “I had no albums to listen to, I had no radio,” he remembers.
But he did possess one piece of technology that would end up having an enormous influence on the career that followed: a looping pedal that allowed him to develop densely layered live arrangements totally alone.
He re-emerged from his barn with a newfound intensity and a new sound that borrowed as much from his classical upbringing as it did from folk music and even indie rock. It was an approach that leaned into space and silence, anticipation and development.
He explored the potential of the fiddle and the looper, the gathering hypnotic rhythm of his violin expanding one layer at a time, the echo of a thing turning back on itself over and over again, the sound.
Bird began relentlessly performing and documenting, releasing a flurry of studio and live recordings. His concept evolved, and he made increasing use of guitar, glockenspiel, and whistling in his songwriting, as well as his traditional violin and vocals. Then he began speaking in tongues.
By the time he released his 2005 album The Mysterious Production of Eggs on Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe label, Bird’s transformation from “lifestyle accoutrement” to conjurer seemed to be complete. And somewhere along the way, it seems, he picked up a thesaurus. Anyone who has spent any time parsing an Andrew Bird lyric knows that he is not afraid of a fifty cent word.
As Bird’s songwriting developed the lyrics often became both more confessional and more impressionistic. He says, “I could go back to every song I’ve written and tell you where it came from personally, but whether it’s obvious to the listener or not is the question.” One gets the sense that he really is letting the sound of the language lead him toward the story he’s telling, even if in the end he knows what it means.
The sound he pursued was not only in the words. Around this time Bird began recording with engineer / producer David Boucher whose own pursuit of evocative sounds would begin to intertwine with Andrew’s. Today much of the sonic landscape associated with an Andrew Bird record can be attributed to Boucher’s recording techniques.
“I could go back to every song I’ve written and tell you where it came from personally, but whether it’s obvious to the listener or not is the question.”
So Andrew Bird has been on this journey now for nearly three decades, from virtuosic violin kid to swing monster, to isolated artist in the barn, to genre defying indie rock folk chamber singer songwriter with 20 full length albums, another 10 eps and a half dozen eps under his belt.
He has composed music for television and film, and appeared as an actor on the fourth season of the show Fargo. It is fair to say that Andrew Bird has the kind of career that is harder and harder to come by today. He has an audience that will follow him whatever direction he chooses to go, he can feed his creative appetites and fill auditoriums. But he is not suffocated by too much fame. He calls this “the upside of staying obscure.”
Throughout his journey, it seems that there has always been a part of him that was waiting to return to the comfort of the jazz standards and the familiar warmth of those Rudy Van Gelder recordings. Wouldn’t they be so nice to come home to?
Earlier this year he released Sunday Morning Put On, a collection of standards performed by Andrew and his working trio of Alan Hampton on bass and Ted Poor on drums, and recorded by David Boucher.
The album is an ode to his favorite recordings from long ago, but also manages to sound totally like itself. The violin trio format leaves room for the Bird’s trademark echo to behave as a fourth member of the band, and for every note to matter.
Andrew calls Sunday Morning Put On a “sabbatical” project because “you learn from it but you’re not totally sticking your neck out.” After so much confessing and living, as he says, “my life in song form” the sabbatical also gives him a break from having to squeeze every drop out of his own life and onto the page.
This relief, along with a deep musical affection for his friend, singer songwriter Madison Cunningham, led Bird to follow his jazz record immediately by another sabbatical project called Cunningham Bird which he released with little fanfare just this month. It is a recreation of the 1973 album by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks Buckingham Nicks.
We spoke last month, just as he was coming off of his summer tour and confronting what he called “the reckoning” of returning home. We talked about his early days in Chicago, the journey that led him into isolation, discovering his sound, songwriting as a form of “speaking in tongues”, what it means to be living his life in song form, and what he learned from singing standards.
