Indie folk rock is lenient when it comes to dictated genre standards. When Andrew Bird started out as a musician in 1996, he was pegged with the usual Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright namedrops before the even more useless Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom comparisons arrived. They were flattering connections, with an emphasis on the flat. Eastern European and classical structure hold Bird’s songs still while he dresses them in his own clothes, namely the whimsical violin loops and contented whistling of a veteran explorer, both of which often become an extension, if not rerouting, of his own voice. While previously he fell in line with “free” and “freak” extensions of the folk label, he’s now returning to the true traditional meaning of the genre on Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of…
As an album of Handsome Family covers, it lends itself well to those familiar and unfamiliar with the material. “Sometimes I start to have a hard time singing my own songs and when I sing other people’s songs, I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s how I sing,’” he says with a laugh when talking with DigBoston. The songs’ blueprint structure allows its raw material to fork over lyrics and melody for easy molding. “When you’ve written a song yourself, it’s so different when now it’s coming from some personal place and you’re grabbing the lyrics out of thin air and making this whole thing exist that wasn’t yours. Plus, if you haven’t lived a song, there’s something really liberating about covering it. I can’t say I’ve lived ‘Drunk By Noon,’ but I can maybe sing it better than someone who has.”
Bird grew up in the Chicago suburbs as the second-youngest of four where, much to his mother’s excitement, he picked up violin at age four and began using the Suzuki method, which stress learning by ear. His education studying classical violin at Northwestern University and his modest DIY marketing method (biking around towns pinning up posters for his shows) paved the slow but steady path for his well-regarded success. We’re talking 12 studio albums, 10 record labels, seven EPs, six live albums, two film soundtracks, one spotlight track on Orange Is The New Black, and dozens of collaborations, from Squirrel Nut Zippers to Ani DiFranco. Now, 18 years since he graduated, Bird is playing to sprawling crowds in Central Park and going stage-to-stage against Lady Gaga at festivals, all before turning 41 this Friday.
Despite his incredibly extensive depth of musical knowledge and performance, he isn’t a fan of jamming. Instead, he’s honed a love for the vigilant simplicity of pop. If he thinks of a melody, he doesn’t write it down; he’ll remember it if it’s worth remembering.
“There’s something nice about a three and a half minute pop song and its restrictions,” he says. Contrary as it seems, limitations can be a good thing for art. “I certainly do whatever I feel like onstage, but when I’m making a record, there’s something nice about crafting a song with the right pacing where it doesn’t overstay its welcome.” What’s left on the cutting room floor are the thick wood shavings of instrumental mahogany. In the case of 2014, that was his I Want to See Pulaski at Night EP.
Bird frequently scraps songs and recreates them in the studio, searching for an equal balance of constructed beauty and immersive, relaxed freedom that feeds lines from his mind out through his fingertips. So it’s odd that Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of… was recorded in his living room with microphones stuck directly in an old two-track tape machine. The process was fast. Not only did it take three days to perform and record, but the artwork was sent out before he had recorded a single song.
Chicago in the mid-90s saw Andrew Bird playing the same bills and attending the same parties as the Handsome Family; falling in love with their sound was inevitable. “The thing about their music is that it’s not immediate for people because, for lack of a better term, it’s goth country. The music is dark and the lyrics are dark. People don’t really see past the clothes that are on the song, and I would have done the same thing if I hadn’t looked a little deeper,” he says. “When I first heard ‘The Giant of Illinois’ and that ‘The sky was a woman’s arms’ line, I was floored. What a remarkable piece of poetry.”
Now it’s time for him to bring the songs to life live as a set. Performing solo is an experience coated in obvious gratification. Performing with the Hands of Glory band, however, is a summer experience in its own.
When he steps onstage with them at the Lowell Summer Music Series, he will be surrounded by Specimen horn speakers. Created by a hometown artist, they look like the horns off old record players. “They sound good, but it’s at least 50% aesthetic,” he admits. “The stage is your 35mm frame, you’re the director of this frame, and you’re filling that frame with functional, beautiful things.” It’s operating art that’s more subtle than, say, a megawatt-burning laser light show. But his performance will still draw a unique energy out of him that makes up for that other 50%. “Sometimes your sing becomes a howl. Outside, everything is epic.”
The album’s songs have all been released in some form or another over the years, but this time he wanted to present it as a collection that could be approachable for someone unfamiliar with both himself and the Handsome Family. “What if you just imagine someone appeared and wrote these songs? Where would you put it?” he asks. The songs, which stand as well-performed, folk, country tunes, are undeniably beautiful. “I remember having a conversation about them with Jeff Tweedy a couple years ago where we were both saying how much we love them. He said that pretty much the best country songs of the last 30 years came from them and I was like, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’”
Hearing it live or hearing it on the album may differ in digestion, but both give the exposure needed to better understand timeless songwriting. “I just wanted to hopefully advance the cause of more people knowing about them because they really nail something that’s very elusive in songwriting and rare,” he says with genuine admiration. “It seems like people are finally starting to get it after 25 years.”
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ANDREW BIRD. LOWELL SUMMER MUSIC SERIES, 67 KIRK ST., LOWELL. SAT 7.12. 7:30PM/$39. LOWELLSUMMERMUSIC.ORG.
