Nine Songs: Andrew Bird

In between sessions of drywalling, this new geographical vantage point induced both revelation and for Bird, “a different measurement for how you experience time”. Amongst the wide-open spaces of the Midwest, the genesis of 2005’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs was formed.

By the time Bird left Chicago, the cities music scene had become a hotbed of radical improvisation, innovation and competing sonic philosophies. While the likes of Gastr Del Sol, Tortoise and the Sea and Cake, informally dubbed the Chicago School of Post Rock, had crafted a sound equally as indebted to bossa nova as it was to Slint, producers such as Steve Albini had implemented widely adopted, bare-bones recording philosophies that read like emphatic treatises on proper approaches to instrumentation.

Looking beyond any stringent musical manifestos and philosophies, Bird’s music has always seemed built around an intuitive, playful opposition to any idea of established musical rules and boundaries. While raised primarily around classical music, Bird’s Suzuki training, an immersive teaching methodology built on the notion of teaching music from an early age by ear, whereby, as he explains, it becomes a “mother tongue”, has given him an approach to music composition and consumption whereby his ear had always learnt faster than his brain.

“I guess I was always more cut-out for the oral tradition” Bird tells me from his house in California when we sit down to discuss his Nine Songs selections, or what Bird lovingly refers to as his predisposition for music with a “populist bent”, a suggestion of the deep extent to which Bird’s song choices overwhelmingly favour a democratic approach to musical interpretation.

While Beethoven’s concertos, in their initial simplicity, provided him early on with the broad ‘crucible’ for which to expand his capabilities beyond the excessive technicality of the classical world, the narcotic sensibilities of swing have expanded his often chorus-less songwriting through the use of the thirty-two bar formula.

Indeed, throughout our discussion, a trend emerges of music and musicians that often possess origins and roots that lie far beyond what is understood to be their genre or scene.

Some of Bird’s formative influences include classical symphonies that borrow from French folk and civil-war themed Anglo-Irish trad, which is equally as indebted to an early life in orchestras as it is to informal pub sessions. As we speak his choices seem to paint a potted history of recorded music that is defined by ideas, structures and sounds that seem to build on one another over the course of time.

Bird’s last two projects, both of which have been cover albums of sorts, one a track-by track interpretation of Buckingham Nicks with Madison Cunningham, aptly titled Cunningham Bird, and Sunday Morning Put-On, an album of Jazz vocal standards, reveal him as a musician still fascinated by how the past affords us the chance to expand the margins of interpretation.

In incorporating Trad-Folk, Jazz or the Blues, Bird’s musical tastes mirror his own music’s preoccupation with songs that serve as blueprints for constant reinvention, or rather resemble that which he admires the most about the classical works of Beethoven, song forms whereby “the architecture is complex but the building blocks are very simple”.

When we discuss how he feels re-visiting The Mysterious Production of Eggs in full for the first time in over a decade, it’s fitting that he is most struck by its meticulous and layered production process, one that he explains as, “every song is a little universe of sketches’ and you would ‘peel back one layer and then layer another right back on top of it”.

Understanding Bird’s pursuit of tweaking and reinventing existing sounds and formulas into increasingly exciting shapes seems to underline his choice to once again rub shoulders with the classical world on his upcoming tour. Bird will be revisiting his canonical album for its 20^th anniversary, over two decades after leaving the world of classical music and orchestra’s behind.

Choosing to perform the album live with the Britten Sinfonia, a chamber orchestra, may seem to be almost a left-field choice, given his decision to exit the classical world, and his previously fractured relationship with its musical and social dynamics, but Bird understands it as offering a new interpretation of the songs that lends itself to the complex counterpoints and structures that define the albums identity.

At the time, Bird reveals that he saw the album as his ‘headphone masterpiece’ and upon initially taking it on tour with the “agile operation” of himself and a drummer, recreating the albums detailed studio sound proved challenging, forcing new contortions and interpretations of the arrangements.

“Live we just had to make it work. I was touring so much and playing so many shows, I had so much commitment to that life that it really got wild and ecstatic on stage”. It makes perfect sense then, that one of the most viewed videos of Bird on the internet is a freewheeling live interpretation of "A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left" at Bonnaroo, with Bird seemingly floating across the stage in a trance-state, a song that he tells me, that is inherently about the struggles of life on the road, of feeling “so gutted and ridiculously tired that you look like a crazy person in the airport”.

While he maintains that every successive album has taken a more considered approach to how it might be realised in a live setting, he admits that the prospect of reinterpreting the whole of The Mysterious Production of Eggs, top-to bottom in an orchestral setting, is a rather exciting project. “It’s kind of a trip. With fifty musicians on stage you can finally do all those intricate parts and it’s a totally different beast”.

The prospect of reinterpretation and reinvention, adjacent to the classical world of his youth, seems fitting for a musician influenced by the margins between genres and interpretation and who has a knack for imbuing new musical contexts with radical energy.

“It would be great to also get that to feel freewheeling, it can be pretty seat of the pants. Not only are all these people on stage with you but some are fifty feet away from you, – it’s definitely wild in its own way”.