Andrew Bird jumps between genres as seamlessly as he switches instruments in concert. He plays violin with the retro swing band the Squirrel Nut Zippers. He contributes violin, mandolin and his name to Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire and he took up just about every instrument when he turned introspective as a solo artist. His solo shows feature a full band sound because Bird loops the violin and guitar that serves as the backdrop for his glockenspiel, whistling, singing and whatever other instruments he decides to toss in.
Bird's love of the eclectic brings him to Madison this Saturday. His current four stop mini-tour aims to raise money for the Chicago Short Film Brigade. The group actually opens the show with what Bird describes as ""15 minutes of totally bizarre, hilarious, entertaining short films that you've probably never seen before.""
Bird talked with The Daily Cardinal earlier this week about his unique concert stylings, the apocalypse and ancient cultures.
The Daily Cardinal: You're doing this tour solo without your drummer, how will that affect the show?
Andrew Bird: I approach it in a completely different way—I don't think of it as a show without my drummer. I choose different songs that I think are going to work better. I probably won't be doing the crazy wall of sound rock out tunes like ""Fake Palindromes."" Sometimes I do those ones solo, but what you can't do in brute force, you're making up for in trying to finesse it or be over the top. I think it's better to focus on the more textural instrumental stuff. It's a chance to be more subtle and try more improvisatory things.
Even though playing with my drummer, he can roll with about anything, it's still liberating to play by yourself.
DC: With all the looping of tracks you do in concert, does it ever become confusing?
AB: Not so much. The only time I get confused—in kind of a revealing way—sometimes I'll open my mouth to sing when I was really supposed to whistle, or I'll lift up my bow to play a note when I was supposed to sing. Sometimes I kind of cross strings in my brain of what's supposed to come out of me. As far as the mechanics of getting the loops to be in time, that's become second nature at this point. Maybe one tune in the set I'll lose my balance and miss a cue, but that just becomes part of the song at that point. The cool thing about it is the failure is incorporated into the performance. I've got it worked out so that things cannot go that bad.
DC: Why don't you have specialists for each instrument?
AB: Because no matter how talented someone could possibly be, they're generally just trying to play something that will make me happy—they're trying to guess what I want to hear. This isn't the best situation creatively. I just found when I started to play my own bass lines they were less inclined to sound like records of the past 30 years. I'm not a bass player and I'm sort of stabbing in the dark. What I'm going to come up with is likely to be more unique. I think in the end the music starts to sound more like it's coming from a different universe.
DC: How does your new CD (Armchair Apocrypha, scheduled for release in March) compare to your other albums?
AB: Yeah, that's become the norm, for every record to be pretty different from the last. If I could characterize the new record, I'd say it's more extroverted than the last one. Eggs was a little more restrained, and this one captures more of the live energy and a little more of an adrenaline-driven thing. This new record has a different approach to phrasing with more long tones, long stretched out words and phrases, where in the past I've packed in as many syllables as I could to a phrase. I really made an effort to stretch it out and make it more minimalistic.
DC: Is there any subject you focus on in the new CD?
AB: I've been into apocalyptic imagery, and there's definitely some political songs for sure. As I'm finishing the sequencing, that's when I start to discover what all my writing is about. I don't really think about it while I'm writing it. But then I realize ""Wait a minute, these three songs are all about the same thing.""
DC: What's the sound like, are they poppy songs about the apocalypse?
AB: I always have liked the contradiction of the happy sad. The melancholy. There's always that contrast, you never are black on blackA-—it's always a contrast. If I'm going to talk about apocalyptic imagery, usually the music is dreamy and like a fake smile on the face. That's how you highlight what you're talking about—not by going with the mood, but going against it. If that makes any sense.
