For example, on the track "Take Courage" Bird whistles like a musician, not just some guy walking down the street. I've had the album on a near loop for days, and it's a grower - the more I listen to it, the more I am sure it will probably remain on my essential albums list years from now.īird, who is currently on tour, really expands as an artist on Noble Beast and yet manages to perfect the framework that made him famous and keep his compositional idiosyncrasies that so many fans treasure still interesting, such as his signature whistling.įew artists can get away with as much whistling as Bird spreads throughout this work because it is always appealing and woven in with the music just perfectly. It's almost a sure bet that his newest release, Noble Beast, will go down as one of the finest albums of 2009. Bird's 2007 album Armchair Apocrypha was widely hailed as one of the best albums of that year. You know, when you stay in one place a lot, you think, Man, everything is so fucked up.Andrew Bird has done it again. I’m not so interested in going to places where there’s densely packed humanity. The Southern Hemisphere still fascinates me, the South Pacific. Is there a part of the world you dream of escaping to? I remember a scene with an old man sitting against a tree and he ties a piece of dental floss around the violin string and plays this beautiful melody. There’s no dialogue, only music and song. It follows Gypsies through different countries-India, Spain, Egypt.
ANDREW BIRD NOBLE BEAST FREE MOVIE
Name a movie that made a strong impression on you. There’s a pretty great description of the Division Street bath house in Chicago.
What’s the last novel you remember liking? I like books about, like, what was happening everywhere on the planet in the year 1310. I like epics I’m reading this huge book about the Comanches. It centers around archaic subjects, like nineteenth-century science when they were trying to get answers and they were doing it terribly wrong. I try to play more like a tenor player than a violinist. Tenor players like Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. I was in my early twenties and pretty enamored with small-group swing from the late twenties and thirties-people like Slim and Slam and Charlie Christian, a guitarist. I took the band to New Orleans, and we spent a week recording a record, all around one microphone. And I picked up the guitar a couple of years ago. I had to think, “What if I can’t play anymore? How can I still be musical?” That’s when I started songwriting. I was a fiddling knave, a serf, in one of those not exactly historically accurate Renaissance fairs, and I got bad tendinitis. I had a violent relationship with the violin-it’s caused me a lot of suffering. When did you start picking up other instruments? I was underage and playing in clubs and girls were dancing and I was like, “This is all right!” I was really desperate to find people that I liked and that I had a chance to hang out with. Until I joined it, when it became I don’t know what-a mix of Irish folk music and these kind of prog-rock ska tunes.
But at the end of music school, when I was 19 or 20, I joined a rock band-a punk-ska band. Yeah, it was not a communal, social thing.
I wanted to be a psychiatrist when I was 10, not a musician. She took psychology classes, and I was her study partner. When I was 14, my mom went to grad school for art therapy-my oldest brother is pretty severely autistic, and I think that was her reason for wanting to do that. Audrey Niffenegger, who’s a fairly famous novelist now, was my mother’s teacher, and she did my first couple of record covers. It’s very intuitive-they kind of mold you. There’s no written music, so you don’t access that part of your brain. It’s like the one-room schoolhouse, with everyone from the beginner to the most advanced all in the same room together, all playing the same tunes, and when you don’t know it you drop out. The philosophy is to teach people when they’re young, make it fun, and it’s all by ear. In the seventies, the Suzuki Method was sweeping American suburbs. How old were you when you started playing music? Hugo Lindgren talked with him about his musical roots. This week, he performs with his four-piece band at Carnegie Hall his fifth solo album, Noble Beast, is just out. The born-and-bred Chicagoan is a classically trained violinist who has developed into one of the most distinctive and creative songwriters working today. Carnegie hall isn’t a natural destination for most indie rockers, but it makes perfect sense for Andrew Bird.