Andrew Bird - Balancing on a Violin String

Life is too long to be the whale in a cubicle

"Strings have no soul, they only vibrate through the heart of whoever makes them vibrate", violinist Shinichi Suzuki used to repeat to his students. Learning to play, he maintained, is like learning to speak: it arises from a process of imitation. The key to education is as simple as a child's gaze: "Music exists for the purpose of growing a wonderful heart".

Andrew Bird's heart grew according to the dictates of the Suzuki method too. At the age of four he was already holding his first violin: never mind that it was just a cardboard box with a ruler... that violin ended up becoming, for him, the most natural way to express his heart.

In her dreams as a mother, Mrs. Bird imagined her children absorbed in playing chamber music in the living room of their house in the Chicago suburbs. In reality, though, only Andrew caught the spark of passion for music: "I learned to play by ear, and until I was twelve it was just a game to me," he recalls. "Before my identity had even taken shape, I was already pretty great on the violin. So I just dove headfirst into it."

At Northwestern University's conservatory in Chicago, though, everything changes: what had once been pure fun starts to feel like a prison. "At the Conservatory I was deeply unhappy, stuck practicing eight hours a day," he notes bitterly. "Things had become serious, competitive and full of tension: everything you'd normally associate with classical training."

There comes a moment in life when the inheritance you've received has to be questioned before it can truly become your own. For Andrew Bird, that moment comes with the discovery that the classical music he grew up with is merely the starting point of his path. "I was never really oriented toward classical music," he admits. "A Mozart or Bach melody and an old folk song were absorbed by my ear in exactly the same way."

That's how Bird began devoting himself to absorbing the most disparate influences. "For the most part I was surrounded by classical music, but already at seven or eight, as soon as I heard something different, from Irish folk to bluegrass, I immediately wanted to imitate it. The most intense phase for me was my passion for early jazz, between the ages of 19 and 24. I couldn't imagine better music than Johnny Hodges or the other artists of that era, they were a huge influence on me. It was mostly pre-war jazz, not be-bop, back when the goal was to create melodies. Then I got into the Fifties with Lester Young and the Verve records."

In 1995, at twenty-two and with a conservatory diploma under his belt, Bird moves to Chicago and starts playing violin wherever he can, from Irish pubs to Renaissance fairs... "The violin is the simplest way I have to express what's going through my head. I let that sound happen in a completely unconscious way."

The lure of rock, though, soon makes itself felt: in 1996 he joins a local band, Charlie Nobody, contributing to the album "Soup"; the group is hardly a model of originality, but the record contains an early version of a Bird original, "Nuthinduan Waltz." A track destined to resurface shortly after on Bird's first self-produced album under his own name, Music Of Hair: on this almost entirely instrumental record, Bird offers a showcase of his violin virtuosity, without yet pushing beyond a somewhat calligraphic approach.

The tracks on Music Of Hair are conceived to form three distinct parts, dedicated respectively to American music, Northern European music, and a sort of personal mélange. There are only four proper songs: the Celtic-tinged ballad "Nuthinduan Waltz," in which Bird presents himself with a deeper, less personal voice than the one that will make him known in years to come; the Mitteleuropean cabaret of "Pathetique," inspired by a poem by Heinrich Heine, with horns and Bird's pizzicato violin accompanying a melody à la Kurt Weill; and finally the murder ballad "Two Sisters" and the ironic "Song Of Foot," which soars in a slightly bolder way. But the jazz numbers that close the record hint that something new is taking shape in Andrew Bird's musical universe.

That’s when you know you’re swinging

A gleam of horns, a skipping rhythm, dapper couples ready to throw themselves into the dance: in the mid-Nineties, swing seemed to have made a powerful comeback in America. Riding the success of the Brian Setzer Orchestra's debut and films like Thomas Carter's "Swing Kids" and Doug Liman's cult movie "Swingers," an entire neo-swing scene was poised to storm the charts. Among its ranks was Andrew Bird, who joined one of the most representative ensembles of the "swing revival": Squirrel Nut Zippers, founded by James "Jimbo" Mathus at the start of the decade.

The first album to feature Bird's violin, "Hot," surprisingly goes platinum, becoming a genuine industry phenomenon in 1997 thanks to the single "Hell," accompanied by a video full of scarlet drapes, soap bubbles and Beelzebub's horns. "Postmodern big band music," as critics struggled to define the group's sound: Bird also takes part in the Squirrel Nut Zippers' subsequent albums (up to "Bedlam Ballroom" in 2000), but by then his attention had already shifted elsewhere.

Together with two former Charlie Nobody bandmates (drummer Kevin O'Donnell and bassist Josh Hirsch), Bird decides to start a band of his own, Bowl Of Fire, taking the name from an early-twentieth-century magic trick catalogue, where objects that would seem utterly mundane today were presented as marvelous wonders for illusionists. James Mathus and Katharine Whalen of Squirrel Nut Zippers also join the group, and after recording a few demos, the band signs with Rykodisc.

Bowl Of Fire's debut, Thrills, is released in April 1998, on the eve of what would come to be remembered as the "summer of swing." As expected, it's a record with an overtly anachronistic flavor: "We were happily immersed, without any apologetic intent, in our passion for the early twentieth century: The Threepenny Opera, calypso, Slim & Slam, Charley Patton, all their strangest corners... We recorded everything with a couple of microphones, the old-fashioned way."

Bowl Of Fire sound like a little orchestra from the Roaring Twenties staging a kind of bizarre Waits-like theatre. Amid swing, dancehall and jump blues, the main limitation of Thrills lies in staying confined within a genre with all-too-distinctive traits. Recorded in a handful of days in New Orleans with producer Mike Napolitano, the record gives Bird the chance to revisit, with his new band, two tracks from Music Of Hair, "Pathetique" and "Nuthinduan Waltz," which for the occasion are reimagined steeped in country-folk tones.

The breeziness of tracks like "Glass Figurine" anticipates the Tin Pan Alley tribute of Dylan's "Love And Theft," while Katharine Whalen's voice chases the ghost of Billie Holiday on the bittersweet "A Woman's Life And Love," drawn from the verses of German poet Adelbert von Chamisso, famous for his cycle of lyric poems set to music by Robert Schumann. While the surges of "50 Pieces" don gypsy clothes, the cover of Charley Patton's "Some Of These Days" brings Bowl Of Fire back to the banks of the Mississippi Delta. But it's in "Eugene" that Bird's wordplay and melodic sensibility find their most effective union.

After contributing to the soundtrack of Tim Robbins' "Cradle Will Rock," in August 1999 Bird returns with a new album alongside Bowl Of Fire, self-deprecatingly titled Oh! The Grandeur. "It's a strange record," he observes in hindsight. "I felt my conception of music slipping beyond my control. Instead of fighting it, I tried to embrace it." Oh! The Grandeur, recorded once again in New Orleans with Mike Napolitano, with the addition of Colin Bunn on guitar, follows much the same blueprint as Thrills without straying too far from its predecessor's atmospheres, except for a greater ambition of intent.

The guitar's flourishes and Bird's fluttering violin seem to leap straight out of an old Django Reinhardt record, though the album ends up feeling weighed down by one too many repetitions. The Caribbean flavors of "Coney Island Shuffle" are more danceable than ever, while the languid "The Confession" will be reborn ten years later, resurfacing on Noble Beast under the title "The Privateers."

Even on Oh! The Grandeur, the tribute to a poet's verse is not missing: this time it's American poet Galway Kinnell (whose work also inspired the title of Music Of Hair), quoted in the hushed "Wait". But Bird's lyrics grow more personal, as when "Tea And Thorazine" tackles the struggles of his autistic brother with a painful irony that wouldn't be out of place on the Eels' "Electro-Shock Blues": “Animate yourself an alternate reality/ Consummate a self-pleasing artificiality/ You can have yourself a tea”.

The short-lived new swing revival fades quickly, and as the new millennium dawns, Andrew Bird finds himself questioning his own future: "When we'd go to a city to play a show, there wouldn't even be a poster advertising it, no radio station playing our songs, and we'd find ourselves in front of maybe forty people." So Bird decides to take on a new challenge: a full-blown pop record, going head to head with the most typical ingredients of popular music: "I wanted to make a good jukebox record," he admits without mincing words. Inevitably, the Bowl Of Fire lineup also undergoes a transformation, with the definitive departure of the former Squirrel Nut Zippers members and the arrival of singer Nora O'Connor alongside O'Donnell, Hirsch and Bunn.

The Bowl Of Fire's third album, The Swimming Hour, once again produced by Mike Napolitano but this time recorded almost entirely in Chicago, was released in April 2001 after a long gestation. "The trick was to record songs that were complex and layered without making them sound overly elaborate. Even though there was a ton going on, at its core it's a spontaneous live performance."

From the opening "Two Way Action", with its pronounced rock edge and flamboyant violin, it's immediately clear that Bird has left the past behind: "I was excited by the way songs like '11:11' and 'Two Way Action' surprised me. Making a record is boring if you just realize all your ideas exactly as you heard them in your head."

From the aching blues of "Why?" to the deep dive into the Anthology Of American Folk Music that is "Fatal Flower Garden", by way of the western gallop of "Way Out West" and the tango flirtations of "Case In Point", Bird shows off the full range of his eclecticism, his voice taking on shades of Jeff Buckley. More than once, though, his urge to put together a grab-bag of genres risks becoming a mere exercise in style, as in the sugary Fifties pastiche of "Dear Old Greenland" or the country flourishes of "Too Long", inspired by a Mississippi Sheiks tune.

Success eludes the Bowl Of Fire once again this time around. But for Andrew Bird, a new turning point - the decisive one - is just around the corner.

Then it was dusk in Illinois

A red farmhouse stands out against the sloping hills, its pale roof peeking through the treetops. In the early morning light, a figure slips past the metal shell of a silo, violin in hand. Then he starts playing in the eerie silence of the countryside.

In 2002 Andrew Bird decides to change his life: he leaves Chicago and moves out into the Illinois countryside, to his family's farm near the small town of Elizabeth. He has a very specific idea in mind: to renovate the farm's barn and turn it into a recording studio. "The point was to try to merge the recording process into one single thing with the daily routine of waking up, having breakfast, and everything else." And while he works on fixing up the barn, immersed in the stillness of the fields, music begins to take shape around him again. A different kind of music, one that needs a slow transformation to learn how to belong to the land surrounding it. "It took a long time to reconcile myself with this new environment and with all the sounds I discovered through such a drastic change of life."

It's a return to essentials, a need to dig down to the very core of things. Bird starts over from his violin and his voice, with no other mediation.

One evening, back in Chicago for a show, he finds himself alone on stage, without the Bowl Of Fire to back him up. To make his solo performance more effective, Bird records his violin on the spot, so he can use loops as accompaniment while he keeps playing: a technique used in those same years on guitar by another American songwriter, Joseph Arthur, and one that would prove to be a surprising source of creative ideas for both of them. Not content with that, Bird decides to add an unusual natural instrument to the violin: his own whistle, as intense and vibrant as the sound of a theremin. "I started whistling almost without realizing it, from when I was five or six years old," he says. "I'd whistle all day long, driving people crazy." That whistle now becomes an element capable of giving his music an even more distinctive character.

While working on the songs sprouting in his rural retreat, Bird puts out a self-produced live album to sell at shows, Fingerlings, the first in a series that would become his own personal "Bootleg Series". A valuable collection of snapshots offering a closer look at his journey as a songwriter, even if - as Bird himself puts it - "live performances are full of peaks and dips and ecstatic moments that, honestly, once you've heard them hundreds of times in the car or at home, risk becoming boring."

Bird immediately presents himself in his new guise as a solo artist, using pizzicato to punctuate voice-and-violin-only pieces like "Action/Adventure", before being joined by Nora O'Connor on some excerpts from the tour he played in 2001 opening for fellow Chicagoans Handsome Family. And to bring full circle the transitional phase documented by Fingerlings, the album's final stretch finds Bird back together with the Bowl Of Fire for a wild, boozy reworking of songs like "How Indiscreet" and "Tea And Thorazine".

Around the same time, Bird also puts out a collection of brief instrumental violin pieces, The Ballad Of The Red Shoes, made together with his mother Beth, who handles the project's artwork. But the time isn't yet right to give The Swimming Hour the follow-up Bird has in mind: the American songwriter decides instead to start putting down on paper some of the ideas he's begun working on. "It was a kind of experiment in setting aside the pressure that surrounds making a record, and letting everything spread out, relax, expand, breathe more freely."

This is how Weather Systems comes about, the true opening statement of a new chapter in Andrew Bird's career. And like any proper beginning, it opens with an introduction bearing a programmatic title: "First Song", a pastoral prologue once again inspired by a poem by Galway Kinnell, with Bird's forceful whistling cradling the melody. The Bowl Of Fire now belong to the past, but Nora O'Connor and Kevin O'Donnell are still by Bird's side, even if their presence stays firmly in the background. The colors grow more muted, the outlines softer, the invention freer: aided by production from Mark Nevers of Lambchop, Weather Systems favors chiaroscuro, from the swaying rhythm of "Lull" to the chamber-music drift of the title track. That very sense of freedom is what marks the watershed from Bird's earlier work, often too tightly bound within the confines of a formula: by subtraction, the Chicago songwriter finally arrives at a face of his own.

Rounding out the picture, alongside a couple of short instrumental pieces and a cover of Handsome Family's "Don't Be Scared", are two songs still in progress, which would only reach their final form on later records: "Skin", the instrumental ancestor of "Skin Is, My" from The Mysterious Production Of Eggs, and "I", a slowed-down (ralenti) version of what would become "Imitosis" on Armchair Apocrypha, inspired by a childhood memory of an episode of "Sesame Street" in which the characters lived inside a capital letter "I".

The lyrics of Weather Systems are steeped in a sense of contemplative solitude: "Being alone it can be quite romantic", Bird sings in "Lull", “Like Jacques Cousteau underneath the Atlantic/ A fantastic voyage to parts unknown/ Going to depths where the sun’s never shone/ And I fascinate myself when I’m alone”. His way of sketching images grows ever more evocative and imaginative: "My favourite songs are the ones that are vague lyrically and not too descriptive melodically", he states. "The songs with the most strength are the simplest and most open ones. The weakest, on the other hand, are the ones weighed down by a concept or by the need to communicate a specific idea".

"Weather Systems" was originally released in April 2003 on a small local label, Grimsey Records, but was soon reissued by Ani Di Franco's Righteous Babe, which gave the album a much wider reach. The record also includes a video track of a short documentary on Bird shot by Robert Trondson, while the artwork was entrusted to the pencil of Jay Ryan of Dianogah, kicking off a lasting artistic collaboration with Bird.

The European edition, issued the following year by Fargo, contains a new track, "Sovay", also released as a single. "I needed a new word to describe unprecedented circumstances", Bird explains of the song's title. "There was this mysterious word, 'sovay', in an old English nursery ballad. I never knew what it meant, but to me it fit perfectly". With its elaborate arrangement and evocative breadth, it's the clearest preview of the direction Bird was taking toward his new record.

The naming of things

Pop craftsmanship is no easy trade. It takes an uncommon sensibility and a sense of proportion to avoid slipping into cliché. It took Andrew Bird years to refine his own particular balance: but in the end, the magic formula revealed itself.

No sooner had recording wrapped on Weather Systems than Bird set to work on the album he'd been planning ever since leaving Chicago. The new songs, having grown on stage over a long period, struggled to find their place in the studio: "almost every song went through 15 or 20 complete rewrites: and I mean different melodies, different lyrics, different arrangements". Bird sketched out two entire versions of the record, both of which were scrapped because they always left him unsatisfied. Then Tony Berg invited him to Los Angeles and introduced him to producer David Boucher: it's with his help that The Mysterious Production Of Eggs finally took shape.

Meanwhile, Bird collaborates with artists of the calibre of Kristin Hersh ("The Grotto") and Bonnie "Prince" Billy ("Sings Greatest Palace Music") and releases a new instalment of his live collection: Fingerlings 2, dated 2004, previews numerous songs from the future The Mysterious Production Of Eggs, including a "Banking On A Myth" duet with Nora O'Connor and a "Skin Is, My" that lets him cut loose with his lightning-fast improvisations. "It's like an invitation to the audience to see what happens in my room or in my barn when I make music. I try to recapture that feeling of discovering something new. And I think it's palpable to the audience when you're taking risks and having fun". On "Sovay", meanwhile, My Morning Jacket step in as an exceptional backing band, lending the track an earthy, Dylan-esque feel. Surprisingly, "Mojo" magazine picks Fingerlings 2 as its album of the month: everything now seems set for Bird's artistic consecration.

"There's always a tension between wanting to write a concise kind of song, one of immediate gratification, that gets under your skin on first listen, and wanting it to expand. I think it's a healthy tension". It's out of this tension that The Mysterious Production Of Eggs is born, a record in which the insights of Weather Systems are refined into sophisticated layers, without ever sacrificing melodic lightness. Bird's violin parts unfold with a lyricism more classical in spirit than ever before: "Ravel and Bach pop up out of my subconscious: that's what I grew up with", he observes. But it all remains in service of a contagious pop architecture, from the Bacharach-esque passages of "Masterfade" to the sudden digressions of "The Naming Of Things" and "MX Missiles".

The restless whirl of "A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left", the driving pulse of "Fake Palindromes", the exotica-tinged romp of "Skin Is, My": The Mysterious Production Of Eggs is a baroque pop record in which guitars intertwine with embroideries of glockenspiel and electric piano, somewhere between Rufus Wainwright and Sufjan Stevens. Bird, however, shies away from the comparisons coined by critics to pigeonhole his music: "I don't like being tied to any particular scene stylistically. I find it oppressive and, in a way, depressing too, at least for me".

Drawing on his direct contact with the reality of farm life, Bird frames the mysterious production of eggs as a metaphor for the artistic experience: "Songwriting – and creativity in general – is one of the few mysterious productions that have survived from my childhood". A creativity made of lyrics with an eccentric vocabulary, peppered with witty puns, pointed images and constant wordplay.

Bird's ironic gaze observes the drift of a world enslaved to the laws of the market, in which everything seems reducible to a measurement: “Get out your measuring cup and we’ll play a new game/ Come to the front of the class and we’ll measure your brain/ We’ll give you a complex and we’ll give it a name”, he whispers amid the delicate arpeggios of "Measuring Cups". "Most of the songs on the record", he explains, "are about childhood under attack from dark forces that want to measure, exchange, buy and sell things that can't be measured". But the essence of life cannot be forced into a formula nor explained through a calculation, as "A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left" reveals: “Ask our esteemed panel/ Why are we alive/ And here’s how they replied/ You’re what happens when two substances collide/ And by all accounts you really should’ve died”.

The only way out seems to be an "Opposite Day" in which every molecule suddenly decides to change shape, overturning the very laws of physics. Or perhaps, as the closing "The Happy Birthday Song" suggests, all it would take is for someone to still be able to sing you "Happy Birthday" as if it were their last day on earth.

The Mysterious Production Of Eggs, released by Righteous Babe in February 2005 with brilliant comic-strip artwork (once again by Jay Ryan), immediately wins over the critics ("Pitchfork" gives it an 8.3) and, buoyed by word of mouth, goes on to sell more than 75,000 copies.

After lending his talents to "Z" by My Morning Jacket and "Knucle Down" by Ani Di Franco, Bird joins the Buffalo singer-songwriter on tour, taking the opportunity to introduce himself to a wider audience for the first time. Many are left speechless by the performances of this perpetually lost-in-thought young man, who needs only to purse his lips to conjure up extraordinary melodies. Bird holds the violin as if it were a guitar, backs his voice with glockenspiel notes and launches into his sweeping improvisations, treading the stage barefoot to show off his one small vanity: a passion for multicoloured socks. "The best ones, the most colourful with the most interesting patterns, are Paul Smith's", he assures us: and if he says so, you can trust it...

Machinations and palindromes

"You are what happens when two substances collide", Bird declared on The Mysterious Production Of Eggs. And what happens a few months after the record's release is a genuine artistic collision between kindred substances: the meeting of Bird and electronic musician Martin Dosh. The two play together for the first time in September 2005, at a concert in Minneapolis, and immediately discover a surprising rapport: "Dosh introduced me to the possibility of a different approach", Bird states.

This is evidenced first and foremost by Fingerlings 3, released by the American songwriter in 2006, in which Dosh's contribution on drums lends new rhythmic dynamism to tracks like "A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left". Unlike previous volumes in the series, however, the new Fingerlings doesn't only feature live performances, but also studio recordings (the unreleased "Dear Dirty") and even pieces recorded in Bird's barn ("The Water Jet Cilice" and "Ethiobirds"), with the song of crickets and the chirping of cicadas serving as an audience.

The collaboration with Martin Dosh also leaves a deep mark on the follow-up to The Mysterious Production Of Eggs, Armchair Apocrypha, recorded mostly in Minneapolis and released in March 2007 after Bird's move to the Fat Possum label. Dosh handles drums, electric piano, wurlitzer and "atmospheres," contributing to Bird's quest for his own personal wall of sound: "it's a texture I'm trying to create with the drums, a 'gentle vastness' where the drums don't hit in a pointed, rhythmic way but function more like a kind of fresco. I'm interested in creating a wall of noise, a texture in which the drums are a part rather than just providing a given beat." Confirming his desire to explore new forms of songwriting, over the molten groundwork of "Simple X" Bird simply adds his own lyrics to a composition by Dosh, "Simple Exercises," which had opened the 2004 album "Pure Trash".

Armchair Apocrypha thus takes on an unprecedented electricity, filling every space with instrumental buildup and dense layers of guitar. "Imitosis" sounds like the perfect synthesis of Bird's eclectic songwriting, caught between dancing literary flair and chiming, interlocking melodic puzzles, while "Plasticities" alternates the enveloping tones of its verses with the bright pop openings of its chorus. The delicate orchestration of "Scythian Empire" offsets the ambitious, impressionistic swirls of "Darkmatter": overall, though, the songs' arrangements too often end up feeling overloaded, losing along the way that subtle grace which ran through the previous album.

With his usual inventiveness, Bird turns a science lesson into the philosophical flash of "Imitosis": “We were all basically alone/ And despite what all his studies had shown/ That what’s mistaken for closeness/ Is just a case of mitosis”. As he himself explains, "some of the best songs come from a desperate attempt to escape, sitting for hours in an airport pulling little song fragments out of my head." But the smile on Bird's face always leaves the door open to hope: "I write a lot more when I'm happy, because I'm motivated and full of hope. The idea that you write songs because you're depressed and need to communicate it somehow isn't true for me. I used to write a lot of songs in minor keys, but minor keys are very limited. They can only be one thing, while major keys have a lot more possibilities."

Armchair Apocrypha marks Bird's definitive breakthrough: the record sells over 100,000 copies and Bird is booked on America's major talk shows, from David Letterman to Conan O'Brien. His most unmissable TV appearance, however, is on the children's program "Jack's Big Music Show," where Bird plays the part of "Dr. Stringz," an unlikely stringed-instrument repairman who shows up to help the puppet characters of the show, singing a sparkling little tune that would go on to show up often in the songwriter's own live shows.

As a companion piece to Armchair Apocrypha, released at the end of 2007 to coincide with his European tour, the EP Soldier On makes room for a more intimate, rarefied atmosphere than the album's. Alongside a remix of "Plasticities" and a demo of "Heretics," Bird strings together three precious unreleased tracks: while "The Trees Were Mistaken" revolves around the beats and reverberations woven by Dosh, the journey into electoral America that is "Sick Of Elephants" floats on an impalpable aura; but it's "The Water Jet Cilice" above all that steals the heart with its folk-laced yearning. Bird also tackles a ballad dating back to World War I, "How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm," giving it delicate, watercolor-like contours. And the duet with Nora O'Connor on "Oh Sister" is simply one of the most intense reinterpretations of a Bob Dylan song to be heard in the new millennium.

Bring a different nomenclature

There are those who think of live shows as a kind of cathartic collective karaoke, and those who instead walk onto the stage wanting to bring something completely new to life every night. Andrew Bird, of course, belongs to the latter category: for him, songs are creatures in constant flux, subjected to endless transformations across every album and every performance. "It's depressing to think you always have to recreate the studio record on stage," he states bluntly. "Every night I try to play a few wild cards just to stay grounded, just to make sure I'm not faking it. The worst possible scenario for me is going on autopilot."

So, after the release of Armchair Apocrypha, Bird doesn't miss the chance to reinvent himself once again on tour: for the first time since the days of the Bowl Of Fire, he decides to bring along a proper backing band, built around Martin Dosh's drums and Jeremy Ylvisaker's guitar. Bird plays America's major festivals (the recording of his Austin City Limits performance is released digitally) and in September 2008 he plays a free concert at Chicago's Millennium Park in front of over 15,000 people.

Testifying to the impact of the new trio Bird brought to the stage, a new live album, Live In Montreal, arrives in 2008. Right away, the violin's strings sketch out the bare outlines of the classic "Why?," leaving the voice free to chase a dazzling blues. Then, on "Opposite Day," in come Dosh's fragmented percussion, which thickens into the driving beats of "Simple X". From the jazzy inflections that punctuate "Skin Is, My" to an "Imitosis" that quivers between jagged guitars and trilling violin, the songs expand and stretch, shifting shape until they erupt in the closing of "Darkmatter".

Andrew Bird's name, by now, has earned a rightful place among the élite of indie songwriting. Even MTV invites him to duet, for its "Iggy" series, with the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma — yes, the very same one who was the first to play at Ground Zero on the anniversary of the Twin Towers attacks.

Meanwhile, from his farm, Bird is ready to get back in the game with a new album. Martin Dosh is still on board, along with Jeremy Ylvisaker and numerous other collaborators, but this time his influence is less pronounced and more finely woven into Bird's own sensibility.

Noble Beast, which hits stores in early 2009, is a colorful microcosm populated by bizarre creatures and harmless sociopaths, a mirage conjured by the imagination of an enchanted violin: a single stroke of the bow is enough to sweep away in an instant all the uncertainties left by Armchair Apocrypha, restoring Bird to the essence of his talent. From the very way the melody of "Oh No" allows his soft voice to intertwine with that of Georgia-born singer Kelly Hogan, the cumbersome electric layering of the previous album gives way to an acoustic soul that harks directly back to the atmospheres of The Mysterious Production Of Eggs.

Recorded for the most part in Nashville with Mark Nevers, with the sound of old Kris Kristofferson and Everly Brothers records hanging in the air, Noble Beast doesn't let itself be pinned down to a single definition: rhythmic textures and synthetic flourishes give the songs unexpected directions, turning the folk hues of "Masterswarm" into a light, Latin-scented stride, while the surges that envelop "Nomenclature" take on an almost Radiohead-like tone, with touches that only in "Not A Robot, But A Ghost" become too heavy-handed.

Amid handclaps and irresistible flourishes, "Fitz And The Dizzyspells" sends M. Ward back to school with the Fab Four to update the manual of the perfect pop song. The arpeggiated veil of "Natural Disaster" and the piano of "Souverian" echo the delicate shades of Beck's "Sea Change". And on "The Privateers" Bird teams up with Sweden's Loney, Dear to rework the old "The Confession," dating back to the Bowl Of Fire days of Oh! The Grandeur.

Swarms of insects and microscopic protozoa drift through the verses of Noble Beast, emerging from the entomology-textbook artwork of the album's deluxe edition. "Only the melody is pure, the lyrics can be corrupted," Bird demurs. But for a brilliant storyteller like him, words hold an irresistible allure.

Ironic, elaborate words, words that become music through their very sound: with his own words, the animal-man is able to build around himself a perfect mirror of illusions, reducing reality to a "pale fac-simile" made of "false conversations on non-existent telephones." And yet, those same words also have the power to carry with them "a different nomenclature," to restore things to their true meaning.

Nomina sunt consequentia rerum, the ancients warned. In the end, this is precisely where man's nobility lies: giving reality its true name. An animal, but not only an animal: "a-non-animal," to borrow Bird's own colourful coinage.

The special edition of Noble Beast adds a second, entirely instrumental disc to the programme, Useless Creatures (later also issued as a standalone release), made by Bird with the help of Todd Sickafoose on double bass and Glenn Kotche of Wilco on percussion. There's an echo of traditional Kenyan music in the rhythms of "Nyatiti," and the natural sounds of Bird's own barn can be heard sighing through "The Barn Tapes": from the post-rock unspooling of "Carrion Suite" to the static electricity of "Spinney," the music ranges across ambient landscapes that shed the constraints of song form, always following the path traced by Bird's violin.

Born out of a meeting with Chicago illustrator Diana Sudyka, the meticulously detailed naturalistic artwork of the double disc brings an entire miniature ecosystem to life with its delicate brushstrokes: "Andrew came to visit me at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago," Diana Sudyka recalls, "we talked about the tiny, intricate communities you can find under a fallen log or under a microscope... and when he started getting poetic about moss, lichen and radiolarians, I felt my brain explode!"

Arriving just a few months later as a direct appendix to Noble Beast is the EP Fitz And The Dizzyspells: a counter-melody with all the charm of possible worlds, even if it adds nothing to what Bird had already shown on the previous record. "Ten-You-Us" trades the soft rhythmic carpet of "Tenousness" for a delicate acoustic arpeggio in the style of Donovan, while "Sectionate City" turns into song form the instrumental digression of the same name already featured on Soldier On: the violin's winding, loping gait is reason enough not to overlook yet another of Bird's games with alternate versions.

Following on from Useless Creatures, in 2010 Bird decided to embark on a special series of almost entirely instrumental concerts, inspired by the idea of "Gezelligheid": "it's a Dutch word," Bird explains, "that can only be roughly translated as 'intimacy,' though that fails to fully capture the intense warmth, the joyful and friendly atmosphere the term conveys in its original language." Intimate spaces, enveloping lights, like gathering around a hearth: these unusual performances gave rise to Fingerlings 4, which documents the evening held at Chicago's Fourth Presbyterian Church. Alongside a collection of instrumental filigree spanning from the era of The Ballad Of The Red Shoes ("Dance Of Death") to more recent times ("Master Sigh"), Bird's voice returns on the previously unreleased "The Sifters" and on a cover of Cass McCombs's "Meet Me Here At Dawn."

Bird's music even made its way to the Guggenheim, as a support to sculptor Ian Schneller's installation "Sonic Arboretum": a small forest of 75 amplifying horns designed to create a symphonic effect, "the din of a multitude of voices."

Bird's instrumental streak continued in 2011 on the big screen, with the score for Jonathan Segal's film "Norman." The story, centred on an eccentric, troubled teenager, pairs perfectly with the floating accompaniment devised by Bird. Besides the version of "Darkmatter" already included on Armchair Apocrypha, the soundtrack offers sketches of two tracks destined to appear on his next album: "Arcs And Coulombs" and "Night Sky," which would become, respectively, "Lusitania" and "Sifters."

Around the same time, Bird crowned his passion for puppets by taking part in a Muppets tribute compilation, "The Green Album," on which he delivers his own take on Kermit the Frog's anthem "Bein' Green."

The ocean like a violin

150 days of fever. Bird's experience on stage after the release of Noble Beast was so intense that it left him in a permanent feverish state. Director Xan Aranda dedicated a documentary to him aptly titled "Fever Year." So, when it came time to record a new album, Bird decided to carry over all the confidence and spontaneity of his live shows. He returned to his barn with an eight-track recorder and a stripped-down lineup: Martin Dosh on drums, Jeremy Ylvisaker on guitar and keyboards, Mike Lewis on bass. "It all started as a glorified rehearsal session," he explains. "The opposite of production: four musicians playing together in a room. There are too many records out there that sound like a series of decisions rather than a performance."

No elaborate scaffolding, no baroque detours. On Break It Yourself, released in early 2012, all Bird needs is to hold on to the strings of his violin and let everything else go. Free to be himself, with no need for added trappings. The result is one of the most precious pieces in his entire discography.

The new songs from the American songwriter search for room to stretch out, driven by a spirit of improvisation that harks back to the bare-bones feel of Weather Systems. From the very first notes of "Desperation Breeds..." the melody hovers weightless, refracts, chases the horizon, coils around a rhythm. "Sifters" takes on the tone of a passionate lullaby, while "Danse Caribe" builds on the original instrumental version released on Fingerlings 4 to set sail on Paul Simon's ship on its journey around the globe, following the route of "The Rhythm Of The Saints." Gone is the immediate shimmer of Noble Beast, replaced by a subtler fascination that reveals itself gradually along the violin's winding paths.

The single "Eyeoneye" flaunts a blossoming of Sixties flavours, but what really stings are the album's more vulnerable moments, like the anxious unfolding of "Lazy Projector." "Lusitania" brings in the soft voice of Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent), guest of honour in a duet with Bird's absent-minded whistling. The bow caresses dances scented with Ireland, fingers pluck the strings to sketch out their contours. And while "Give It Away" spins tongue-twisters with its usual lightness, the stride of "Near Death Experience Experience" slips contagiously among the classics of Bird's repertoire.

The outlook of Break It Yourself seems to turn more personal than in the past. But even when he sings about love, Bird always does it his own way. Here he steps into the shoes of a child visiting an old woman at a nursing home, to capture that bond mysteriously able to unite two destinies: "What if you were 75 and I were 9?/ Would I still visit you, bring you cookies in an old folks' home?" In the end, the music becomes one with the breath of nature, accompanying the chirping of crickets under the night sky. "The sound is a wave like a wave on the ocean," Bird sings. "The moon plays the ocean like a violin."

For Break It Yourself, Bird offers a very special limited edition, complete with themed stationery and stamps, plus a DVD documenting the recording of the album, titled "Here's What Happened". Between 2011 and 2012, Bird also gives fans two live EPs in digital format: the first, Fake Conversations, focuses mainly on older songs, while the second, Northwest Passage, centers on the live rendering of the new material. And the lyrics of "Tables And Chairs" ("I know we're gonna meet someday/ In the crumbled financial institutions of this land") take on a prophetic relevance in a time of financial crisis.

From the same recording sessions as Break It Yourself also come the EP Give It Away (featuring a cover of "So Much Wine" by Handsome Family) and, more importantly, Hands Of Glory: a work presented by Bird himself as the "musical companion" to Break It Yourself, but one that in truth sits far too awkwardly in the role of mere appendix. On Hands Of Glory, Bird's violin takes on a more country-inflected tone than ever. This is fiddle music, music born to accompany rustic dances and family gatherings. No longer the music of a man who "has spent a little too much time alone", as he sang in "Effigy", but the celebration of an unhoped-for chance to share the notes of one's own heart. In a way, it closes the circle back to the days of Bowl Of Fire.

Just listen to the carefree tone of the classic "Railroad Bill", which Bird performs with an effervescent western swagger. It might sound almost out of place next to the refined sophistication Bird has always distilled into his songs. And yet it is precisely the perfect synthesis of the sense of community that pervades Hands Of Glory, something felt also in the choice of material: from yet another tribute to old friends Handsome Family ("When The Helicopter Comes"), to the renewal, in the airy "Spirograph", of his bond with Alpha Consumer (the band featuring Jeremy Ylvisaker), from whose catalogue Bird had already drawn "The Crown Salesman".

Hands Of Glory thus looks to tradition, but not so much in terms of reviving a canon. What seems to fascinate Bird is rather traditional music's ability to penetrate the mystery of things: love, death, fate. And, above all, incompleteness. That's what Townes Van Zandt sings about in the tormented lines of "If I Needed You": the illusion of self-sufficiency, the deep need for someone to entrust one's desire to. “If I needed you/ Would you come to me/ And ease my pain?”. Bird makes it his own through the voice of his violin, magically carrying it aboard Dylan's "Rolling Thunder Revue".

It's the echo of this awareness that is reflected in the words of "Something Biblical": "In your absence nothing's growing/ And still the county remains dry". Nothing blooms in solitude. And when the hour of farewell arrives, the recognition becomes even simpler: "You will need somebody when you come to die", Bird sings in "Three White Horses". Not for tears, nor for consolation. But because the self is only fulfilled in a you.

Between 2012 and 2013, Bird returns to touring, both with a full band and in the "Gezelligheid" format, even performing in the middle of the Mojave Desert alongside Tift Merritt in support of America's national parks with the "The Quietest Show On Earth" project.

At the end of 2013, the American songwriter releases an almost entirely instrumental EP on the small label Grimsey, titled I Want To See Pulaski At Night. An EP that revolves entirely around the track that inspired its title, "Pulaski At Night": "I had this new song ready", Bird explains, "and instead of waiting a few years to release it, I wrote a sort of soundtrack to go with it, as if the song were a film".

The off-the-cuff genesis of the EP matches the feeling of a work knocked out in one go, one that doesn't stray too far from Bird's previous forays into instrumental territory. It's no surprise, then, that the only moment that truly feels complete is when Bird's voice returns: the ode to Chicago that is "Pulaski At Night", placed emblematically at the center of the tracklist and built entirely around the contrast between its driving pace and its unfurling melody.

The wind will be my hands

The return to roots that Bird undertook with Hands Of Glory continues in 2014 with an entire album devoted to reinterpreting songs by Handsome Family. Bird has, after all, expressed his love for the music of husband-and-wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks on more than one occasion, long before this project. One wonders, then, what bond ties the American songwriter so intimately to the Handsome Family's songs. Bird himself tries to explain it, in presenting Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of...: "I feel like I inhabit their songs as much as I do my own", he reflects. "They've basically become part of my own writing process and my performances".

Here, then, is the first key: the writing. Bird's as evocative and elusive as the Handsome Family's is lyrical and narrative. And so, on Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of..., Bird grapples above all with storytelling. A story steeped in American Gothic atmospheres, somewhere between Flannery O'Connor and the "Anthology Of American Folk Music". It's precisely to make room for the story that Bird seems to want to step back from the songs he's tackling, leaving space for tales worthy of the purest Appalachian tradition.

This leads us straight to the second key: tradition. It's no coincidence that both the approach (live recording around a single microphone) and the lineup are essentially the same as on Hands Of Glory. With the crucial addition of singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, whose voice is essential in recreating the Handsome Family's vocal harmonies. The relationship with the past, after all, is nothing new for Bird: "I started out with Bowl Of Fire doing the same kind of thing", he recalls, "but back then it was different: I was driven mostly by nostalgia, whereas now I've arrived at an old-time sound because I felt the need for something less produced".

The path Bird has chosen, in short, is one of subtraction. But the straightforward unfolding of the songs drawn from the Handsome Family's catalogue ultimately lacks, on the whole, the kind of personality capable of giving rise to a genuine act of appropriation. Only in a couple of moments do we find the flashes typical of Bird's style, from the pizzicato of "Tin Foiled" to the aching beauty of "Far From Any Road (Be My Hand)" (rediscovered in 2014 as the theme song for the TV series "True Detective"). And it's precisely there, at the close, that the album reaches its peak, with the interplay of double bass and violin evoking the solitude of a desert landscape: "Rise with me forever across the silent sands/ And the stars will be your eyes, and the wind will be my hands".

On the instrumental front, meanwhile, 2015 sees the birth of a new project, aptly named "Echolocations", in which Bird sets out to immerse his music, more fully than ever, in a specific geographic context.

The first volume, Echolocations: Canyon, grew out of a soundtrack written for an exhibition by Ian Schneller and captures recordings made among the canyons of Coyote Gulch, Utah, highlighting the most ethereal and experimental side of Bird's music. The second volume, released in 2017, is titled Echolocations: River and centers on Bird's performance beneath the historic Hyperion Bridge in California.

Leave the valleys of the young

Life is a serious matter, according to Andrew Bird. Which doesn't mean our favorite whistler has decided to lecture us: he's simply chosen to let experience speak before poetic fiction does. The very man who is an imaginative juggler of words, for once, needs no disguise. It's enough for him to be himself. With one simple, direct question: "Who has time for poetry, when dealing with things like birth and death?"

This is real life, in other words - life that gives no quarter, pure and simple life taking over in 2016 on Are You Serious. And right from the album's title, Bird seems to be winking at what he describes with an ironic smile as "my personal foray into the realm of confessional songwriting".

Anyone expecting the classic intimate turn, though, would be way off the mark: from the very first notes, Are You Serious seems intent on reclaiming the pop grain of Noble Beast, after the folk digressions explored starting with Break It Yourself. The driving beat of "Roma Fade" and the melodic flourishes of "Puma" even suggest a more outgoing Bird than ever, buoyed by the vigor of a new band (with Blake Mills on guitar, Ted Poor on drums and Alan Hampton on bass).

Behind the newfound soul sinuousness of the single "Capsized", though, it's not hard to spot traces of a couple of gospel classics that Bird transfigured live for years ("Jesus Is A Dying Bed Maker" and "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning", already present back in 2002 on the first Fingerlings). The roots of tradition, then, remain the constant watermark that keeps shining through even in the new songs, from the acoustic watercolors of "Chemical Switches" to the old-fashioned folk litany of "Saints Preservus".

Are You Serious thus turns out to be a more multifaceted record than its opening tracks might suggest, the result of work that favors a more methodical approach over the spontaneity of Break It Yourself.

Between songs that already book their place of honor in his songbook (above all the title track, directly in the wake of "Imitosis") and now-recurring nods to the travel diaries of Paul Simon ("The New Saint Jude"), if there's a limit, it's the lack of surprises, on a record that lines up flawlessly everything you'd expect from an Andrew Bird album.

It takes an unexpected twist to shake things up, and that's exactly what happens when Fiona Apple steps in for the duet "Left Handed Kisses": thanks to her, the song's original sketch (which Bird had already brought to the stage with Tift Merritt at the 2013 Newport Folk Festival) turns into something profoundly different, a love-duel roughened by a long whiskey-soaked night, bringing back memories of the old sparring matches between Johnny and June.

The songs on Are You Serious reflect the changes that have taken place in Bird's life, from marriage to fatherhood to his move to California. But for him it's "Valleys Of The Young", with its electric build reminiscent of Armchair Apocrypha, that represents the heart of the whole record, the definitive crossing of the shadow line separating youth from maturity, aware that he's also carrying the weight of someone else's fate: “Still our hearts are constantly breaking/ From their cradle to our grave/ Is it selfish or is it brave?”.

That's why the question is so insistent, so stubborn, so urgent: “So tell me, are you serious?/ Are you serious?/ ‘Cause every night of your life/ You’ll fight for it”. Without taking yourself seriously, it wouldn't even be worth throwing yourself into the fray. "But are you serious when it really comes down to it?"

The deluxe edition of the album offers a couple of extra tracks, just to round out the picture of a renewed calling for auteur pop, with an ever-brighter rendition of "Pulaski At Night" (retitled simply "Pulaski" for the occasion) and the colorful "Shoulder Mountain".

Now there are no sides

The Age of Anger: that wouldn't have been a bad title for an Andrew Bird album. The phrase coined by writer Pankaj Mishra to sum up our times fits perfectly with the set of songs the American songwriter churned out in 2019. Songs that speak of an "uncivil war" we're all immersed in, enlisted in a kind of permanent conflict. Because the "global civil war", as Mishra writes, is something that concerns everyone's inner self: "its Maginot line runs through the hearts and souls of people". Bird places himself right on the front line of that inner trench. Not pointing fingers, but taking on the hardest challenge of all: looking within.

For quite a while, Bird racked his brains trying to sum all this up in an album title. Then he simply stopped trying. And decided to go for self-deprecating humor instead: My Finest Work Yet, modest as ever... Which, deep down, is what every artist thinks of their latest creation, even if they usually don't have the nerve to put it in writing. As if that weren't enough, on the cover he's dressed up as Jacques-Louis David's Marat: "Am I, or am I not, a truly tormented poet?" he seems to be asking with a smile. Now more than ever, levity will save the world.

But what matters is that this My Finest Work Yet really is one of the most brilliant chapters in Bird's discography. The most direct one since The Mysterious Production Of Eggs, you might say. Perhaps it's down to the confidence he displays, even at the expense of charting new territory. Backed by the same band as on Are You Serious, Bird once again puts his songwriting gift at the service of immediacy: "I felt a different urgency writing these songs," he explains, "as if this time I had a specific purpose."

If "Sisyphus" immediately delivers one of his most memorable whistled melodies, it's the infectious chorus of "Fallorun" and the soft swirls of "Manifest" that showcase the record's pop soul. Bright colors chase each other throughout the album, from the plasticity of the pizzicato on "Olympians" to the tempo shifts of "Don The Struggle", via the soul-flavored horns that introduce "Proxy War". "I was obsessed with the idea of capturing a jazz-combo sound," Bird recalls, "that kind of blend of jazz and gospel that was around in the early Sixties." You can hear it most of all on "Bloodless", the song that, since late last year, had already heralded the release of My Finest Work Yet and had been hailed as a modern protest song against the Trump administration. Between biblical references and nods to the Spanish Civil War, "Bloodless" actually goes further, digging into a chronic resentment manipulated by the algorithms of social media.

We feed on hatred like the monsters in some old B-movie, and in the end our enemies become everything that defines us ("A three-headed monster swallows Tokyo/ Her enemies are what make her whole": once again, seriousness and irony in perfect balance...).

But what would happen if we simply turned our backs on all this? If we decided to stop playing the game of pitting ourselves against each other? Instead of condemning ourselves to push our boulder uphill like Sisyphus, what if we let it roll back down: "Let it roll, let it crash down low" is the motto of "Sisyphus". Could this be exactly the way to stop being scattered atolls lost in the ocean, to rediscover our bond as human beings? “So take my hand, we’ll do more than stand/ Take my hand, we’ll claim this land/ Take my hand, and we’ll let the rock roll”. Maybe Camus was right: "one must imagine Sisyphus happy".

At the end of 2019, Bird released a Christmas EP in digital format. But in the solitude of the spring 2020 lockdown, the idea began to take shape of developing those songs into a full album. The record, titled Hark!, arrived in October of that same year, preceded by "Christmas In April": "When will we know if we can meet under the mistletoe?", Bird wonders. And his voice is that of the uncertainty of an era suspended between the x and y axes of the epidemic curve.

It all started from the festive melodies of Vince Guaraldi's "A Charlie Brown Christmas", which Bird began improvising on purely for jazz pleasure. "Christmas Is Coming" floats along on carefree whistling, while in "Skating" it's the violin chasing after Ted Poor's drums, Alan Hampton's upright bass and Jeff Parker's guitar.

Bird then puts together a glittering gift wrap of covers that are Christmassy really only in their seasonal backdrop: the opening "Andalucia" (from John Cale's songwriting masterpiece John Cale, "Paris 1919") is the record's high point, with a nostalgic sweetness that seems tailor-made for Bird's plucked violin. Then there's the tribute to the memory of the late John Prine, with a version of "Souvenirs" that trades the dusty directness of the original for a playful liveliness. And there's no shortage of old friends Brett and Rennie Sparks, better known as Handsome Family, to whom Bird had already dedicated the covers collection Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of…: this time their "So Much Wine" merges with the notes of the Christmas carol "What Child Is This?", blending the sacred and the profane under the title "Greenwine".

From the more traditional repertoire come a solemn "Oh Holy Night", entrusted to Bird's vibrant whistle, a sober, conversational rendition of the inevitable "White Christmas", and the swinging epilogue of "Auld Lang Syne". For once, Bird also takes on a piece of classical music in his own way: Schubert's lullaby "Mille cherubini in coro", one of the favorite pieces of the American songwriter's mother (who is also responsible for the album's artwork, something that hadn't happened since the days of The Ballad Of The Red Shoes).

Rounding out the tracklist are the original songs: a trio of simple, enveloping tunes in the most established Bird-ian style (besides "Christmas In April", there's "Alabaster" and "Night's Falling"), along with the instrumental "Glad", penned by bassist Alan Hampton. Tradition without major surprises, but that's precisely the heart of the record: "honestly, that's just what Christmas music is like", Bird admits. "It has a utilitarian function. The smell coming from the oven, the beauty of the lights, and whatever's on the stereo. Music is just one of the factors that contributes to our shared or solitary joy and melancholy".

What if the world goes spinning off its axis?

Looking inward. That's more or less what everyone was forced to do during the pandemic that brought the world to a halt in 2020. And it's no coincidence that the record Andrew Bird conceived during lockdown is titled precisely Inside Problems. The American songwriter, who in 2019 had also appeared as an actor in the series "Fargo", chose to build the record (released in 2022) around a solid four-piece lineup – Alan Hampton, Mike Viola, Abe Rounds and Madison Cunningham – for a set of songs marked by constant harmonic and instrumental tension.

Opening the proceedings are the chamber-folk expansions intercepted by the jazzy funk shuffle of "Underlands". Even the seemingly light-hearted, charming indie-folk of "Faithless Ghost" and the nearly seven minutes of the sparkling "Eight" aren't entirely ordinary: credit goes to the instrumental finishing touches – the violin tones in the former, the long instrumental coda in the latter – that stretch their boundaries and simple directives well beyond the obvious.

It's a continuous succession of metaphors and reworkings of the seven notes, which together make up the raw material of the shape-shifting, Velvet Underground-esque love song "The Night Before Your Birthday", the charming chamber folk of "Lone Didion", or the playful, Jonathan Richman-style folk'n'roll of "Stop N' Shop". Reviving his recent collaboration with Jimbo Mathus, Bird gives him prominence in the most retro melody on the record ("Faithless Ghost"), while classical roots peek through in the hidden quotations behind the folk-pop lightness of "Atomized" or in the elegant instrumental coda of the delicate ballad "Fixed Positions".

Inside Problems confirms Andrew Bird as an elegant, sumptuous songwriter (the title track, "Make A Picture") and, at the same time, an introspective, austere one ("Never Fall Apart"). The following year saw the addition of an instrumental counterpart, Outside Problems (along with the interlude of an only partially successful roots collaboration alongside longtime companion Jimbo Mathus, These 13).

In 2024, Bird decided to pay tribute to his jazz roots with Sunday Morning Put-On, a covers collection that draws on the repertoire of the "Golden Era" of the 1930s and '40s – the music he used to listen to on the radio every Sunday morning when he was twenty. Bird approaches the jazz standards with a minimalist touch, tackling the dimension of improvisation from a songwriter's perspective as well: "I can't help but treat this material as if it were my own. I just can't escape my pop sensibility, my love for songs with an effective lyric and a concise melody".

It's no surprise, then, that tracks like Cole Porter's "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To" or "Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise" pull off the spell of a genuine transmutation into Bird-ian originals. The violin offers up every facet of its strings (now a rhythmic anchor, now the lyrical key of the songs), while the voice lends itself with lightness to romantic elegy. The tones remain hazy, languid, a touch dreamy: exactly as befits the soundtrack to a Sunday morning.

It brings to mind the journey into the Great American Songbook undertaken by Bob Dylan in his infatuation with the great crooners of the past (the one that produced "Shadows In The Night", "Fallen Angels" and "Triplicate"): the desire to seek out the essential, among the vintage souvenirs of Tin Pan Alley, is the same one you can hear in the languor of "I Fall In Love Too Easily" and "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face", or in the ethereal contours of "My Ideal" (where Bird's inevitable whistling makes another appearance).

From his first toy violin to the songs that grew up within the walls of his barn, Andrew Bird's career has never followed conventional paths. The experiences he's gone through have helped make his music unmistakable: that dreamy, wandering whistle, that eclectically-moving violin, that voice capable of soaring with Buckley-esque grace… And yet his alchemy never sounds remotely predictable: the secret lies entirely in the lightness with which each element weaves together with the others, without the fine stitching of the arrangement ever becoming redundant. It's been a long road to get there. But then again, that's exactly what the Suzuki method teaches: time is made precisely to reveal the heart of a man.

Contributions by Gianfranco Marmoro ("Inside Problems")

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