Andrew Bird - Balancing on a Violin String

by Gabriele Benzing, Alessandra Reale

What value do words have? The more we repeat them, the more they seem to lose meaning, like so many characters lined up in a faded dictionary that no longer speaks of experience. But for Andrew Bird things are different: in his music, words are like the breath of a new creation, re-emerging from nothing to take shape and color. Fresh off his only date in Italy and with a new EP (“Fitz And The Dizzyspells“) out these very days, the whistler from Chicago talks to us about the fascination words hold for him and about coming to terms with his own nature as a (a)social non-animal.

Looking back at your career, your solo turn after the Bowl Of Fire experience could be traced to a performance in Chicago, in the winter of 2002, where you opened for the Lonesome Family. Can you tell us about that night?

I'd spent the previous six months mostly in isolation inside my barn – a place I'd built with my own hands. Maybe to justify that isolation and that solitude, I came up with a new way for me to make and conceive music. I hadn't really realized what I was doing at the time, and I still thought I needed a band to make valid music. For that show I couldn't have my band backing me up, so I tried that loop thing, and it worked better than I could have imagined.

Your decision to go live out in the countryside, far from the big cities, might look like a choice of isolation. But listening to your records, the impression is rather that it was your way of finding the space you needed to observe reality more deeply...

That's true. I needed a different reality, one with wider views, panoramic vistas, open skies. But I've fought against the impulses that would have led me to be so far removed from social relationships. Sometimes people are the last thing to be taken into consideration. Or sometimes people demand compromises and scaled-down expectations that I was tired of making. I'd already left classical music behind to look for a social context that felt more natural for music.

Your music is rich in layers, yet it always manages to keep its own lightness. How do you think it's possible to reconcile a song's musical richness with a simplicity of approach that avoids slipping into intellectualism or pretension?

Simply by paying attention.

Words seem to hold a unique fascination for you: in your songs, lexical refinement is an unmistakable element, one that leads words to become music themselves. Are you drawn to the idea of the power of the word, that "naming" of reality you sing about on the new record?

On this new album there's a particular fascination, or a nostalgia, for that period of natural history, in the nineteenth century, when new species were being named, and there's an aversion to the overuse or devaluation of everyday vocabulary. I want to rediscover the potential energy of language. The moment before something is given a name. I go looking for wonderful, arcane words in order to fill them with meaning again.

"I will become this animal, perfectly adapted to the music halls", you sing on "Anonanimal", from the latest "Noble Beast": do you think that's a goal you've achieved over the course of your career, or do you see it more as a kind of habituation, tied to a simple "evolution of the species"?

I chose a profession that reconciles all my antisocial tendencies. I always have an excuse not to directly engage with people, so that I can relate to them through the "safety" of the stage. I think the universality of a song like "Anonanimal" lies in asking what kind of animal each of us is willing to turn into, evolve into, or be deformed into in order to do our job. At what cost?

What would you never want said about your music?

Derivative, boring, unmusical.

Your songs are constantly evolving, changing with every performance and even coming back from one record to another wearing a new face. A bit like Dylan, whose approach has been compared to that of a painter continually retouching his own paintings, bringing out different details each time... Do you think these words could apply to you as well?

Dylan freed himself from a fixed pattern, and that requires putting yourself on the line and keeping the songs human and alive. Songs like "Imitosis" or "Why?" have a fertile framework on which I can always build something new. You have to build up your own stamina, especially as a solo artist, to know that in that moment you're alive and present.

Your tours are always pretty exhausting: your performances are generally a burst of energy that sweeps up everything, from the stage to the audience, and considering that you manage something like 200 shows a year, it's natural to wonder if you have some secret for sustaining such emotionally draining experiences at that pace. How do you keep the momentum alive when you're on stage?

Being exhausted is an altered state that you can either embrace or master. The deeper I get into a tour, the fewer inhibitions I have, and I'm surprised by what comes out of that.

Among your various activities is also that of a music teacher at the Old Town School of Folk Music, and your appearance on a children's TV show as "Dr. Stringz" has become something of a minor cult item… What do you think are the most important aspects of music education?

I haven't taught in twelve years. I could picture myself teaching when I'm old, but only in a way where I could show students what I've taught myself.

"Rock" music and "classical" music: sometimes the attempt to create a fusion between the two worlds risks cheapening the specific dignity of both. What do you think about that, especially in light of your own "classical" training? Can you tell us something about your experience playing alongside the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma for Mtv?

That's a question that presupposes a kind of reflection that escapes me. Talking and playing with Yo-Yo Ma was fantastic, but Mtv did its best to make it bland.

You're known as a whistler, and whistling is certainly one of the most distinctive aspects of your music. We'd like to close the interview with a quote from Boris Pasternak that describes poetry starting precisely from whistling: “Poetry is a whistle that suddenly extends high-pitched, it's the creaking of muffled ice, it's the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales. It's the sweet thud of a pea, it's the universe in tears inside a shell”. What do you think of that?

This quote feels like a reminder to stay human and to create friction. The tactile topography of sound. Sometimes this impulse toward humanity can become desperate. We have a lot to deal with.

(28/05/2009)