Andrew Bird

GETTING SERIOUS

An interview with Andrew Bird

Necessity is the mother of reinvention, it would seem, and 20 years into his career, wordplay wunderkind Andrew Bird is doing an about-face and showing his audience more of the man behind the music.

Fond as he has always been of dancing around the point, the New Weird American singer-songwriter’s tenth solo album Are You Serious is all about cutting to the quick, as he says in the title track.

“Things in my life have caused me to lose patience with some of my own tendencies – that is, abstraction and poetics,” says Bird, awaiting press in Brooklyn just days before the album’s world tour begins. “Sometimes you just need to say it.”

Now 42 and living with his wife and son in Illinois, Bird has decided that life is too short to be wordy, and has resolutely left the valleys of the young for a lyrical landscape in which both his former third-person persona and his own real-world behaviours undergo intense scrutiny.

“I’ve always been pretty hard on my previous self,” he says. “It’s probably healthy – it gets me to move on and get out of my comfort zone. I always know when I’m onto something with a record if I feel a little embarrassed or a little fearful of what I’m about to put out there. If I’m offending myself or my sensibilities a little bit – or not even a little bit, a lot – I’ve come to know that to be a good sign.”

Certainly, Bird pulls no punches when deconstructing himself – in a choice lyric from ‘Are You Serious’, he sings, “Used to be so wilfully obtuse / Or is the word abstruse? / Semantics lack a noose / Get out your dictionaries”. The shift in self-awareness, Bird admits, may even change the way he styles himself onstage.

“I’m usually not so aware of my own reputation when I’m writing, but that [song] by design is about, like, what if Andrew Bird came out onstage to high-fives in the front row, or stage-dived, or was suddenly posturing like Bono?” he laughs. “I’m extremely comfortable onstage, but I do it via just slightly amplifying the way that I usually am, and pointing out the absurd situation… I feel a little more like a comedian than a musician sometimes.”

The question he poses to himself as an artist (and just a human being) in the album title is one of sincerity, and the role of seriousness in his songwriting and storytelling.

“I used to think when I would go see the confessional singer-songwriter thing in Chicago in the ’90s, that’s what would go through my head,” he says. “It wasn’t a criticism, it was just like, ‘Man, are you serious? Can you really back that up?’ I was coming from such a different place than that.”

The new level of transparency also shifts the power dynamic between Bird and his audience, something to which the multi-instrumentalist is surprisingly open. Sincerity, for him, means speaking to people on a more personal and profound level. “There’s a reason why almost no other medium like music is what people come to to get through a hard time, where it becomes the soundtrack of your life,” he says. “They don’t often go to a filmmaker or a novelist for that. Music plays that role for people, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot – what am I doing?

“I wanna make something useful for people, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard a song and thought, ‘This song’s about my life.’ It’s really rare for me. I’ve just been so deep in it for so long I just maybe had forgotten a little bit what music is used for by most people.”

Helping him in assembling his new vision are such luminaries as the “very uncompromising” Fiona Apple, who performs in duet with him on ‘Left Handed Kisses’; Mysterious Production Of Eggs producer and “musical heavy” Tony Berg, who guided the album to fruition; and the legendary conceptual artist John Baldessari, who contributed album art.

“[Baldessari] can take two words like ‘Pure Beauty’ and spell the words out and put them on a stark white background, and you just know there’s more, there’s so much intent behind that and so much humour,” says Bird. “That’s what I really like in songwriters – when it’s a really, really distilled line.”

Distillation implies a purifying and crystallising of elements – Bird may be changing, but the evolution is a natural one, filtered through experience. His maturing as an artist sees him desiring more and more to connect with a broader audience on a deeper level.

“What gets me up in the morning sometimes and when I start getting an idea in my head is, ‘This one could be it, this is the one that could get the whole world singing the same song,’” he says. “It’s that kind of delusion of grandeur that keeps you going.”

As he sets out from Illinois to tour the new album, he journeys into the unexpected, but naturally we’ll be seeing plenty of the old Andrew Bird among whatever new stage antics happen in the moment.

“I have to admit, sometimes I like to stay busy onstage because that’s my thing; I can’t last very long without playing something and just standing before an audience,” he says. “I had to resist on the record, I wanted to let loose and rip a lead, and it was like, ‘No, if I do that it will become a thing…’ But live, I might very well rip a lead, we’ll see. Maybe I will put a blindfold on and jump out into the audience. Can’t say.”

Andrew Bird's Are You Serious is available now from Loma Vista/Universal. Image by Reuben Cox.

Post originally printed in The BRAG; available at http://www.thebrag.com/music/andrew-bird