THE FIRST TIME I heard Andrew Bird was almost exactly eight years ago. It was very early in the morning and the sun was still rising. I was driving to work and decided to play a CD burned by my friend, a selection of his favorite songs. The first was Bird’s “Yawny at the Apocalypse.” To say it was a spiritual experience wouldn’t be quite right—it was an aligning experience. The perfectly crescendoing piece of music filtered through the surrounding trees and palpably brightened the early morning. The timing was coincidental, but the moment was so beautiful I began to cry.
Bird’s music is whimsical but never cheesy. Smooth, swooping melodies perfectly balance sharpness with softness. His songs are characterized by technically tight riffs, piercing whistles, and wordy, cerebral lyrics. We talked to Bird about the spirituality of performance, internal songwriting, and his new album, Are You Serious.<
MERCURY: Many people have characterized your music as sounding like it’s from some otherworldly realm. When you’re songwriting do you approach the music as coming from this separate world?
ANDREW BIRD: I can really keep myself pretty entertained in my interior world. For instance, when I’ve got some time to kill or I’m on a long drive, I’ll start playing a melody in my head that’s been circulating, and I can just work for five, six hours straight on it without picking up an instrument or putting pen to paper, just sort of experimenting. My internal playback system is pretty loud, and taking that to the live performance—which is probably the most sacred thing I do—that part of the whole experience feels like a parallel universe. Being on stage, performing these songs, feeling connected, hopefully. That should be the ultimate realization of that internal world—the externalization of projecting it out of your body. That’s the most important ritual.