Free As A Bird
It’s taken the Muppets-loving Andrew Bird 10 years to become an overnight sensation. Ed Power catches up with the reluctant rock star in Paris.
Ed Power, 23 Mar 2012
It’s springtime is Paris and Andrew Bird and family have just touched down for fashion week. Really? An archetypal tortured soul, we have a job picturing Bird squeezed alongside Anna Wintour on the runway touchline, pout set to stun.
“My wife is a designer, so she has a few meetings set up,” he explains.
“We’re not making the scene or anything. She does appointments. People come and check her collection at our apartment. We won’t be doing any of the shows. That’s not how we are wired.”
You can glean a lot about Bird’s distinctively downbeat persona from the way he makes an extended sojourn in Paris – he’s taken an apartment a few blocks from Notre Dame Cathedral at Île Saint-Louis – sounds like the mother of all drags. A performer who wears his po-facedness like a badge of professional pride, he’s spent the past ten years running away from his natural gift of melody and tuneful catchiness. Those were prominent qualities of his Chicago band Bowl Of Fire, which he broke up as they were on the brink of a break-out. Why pull the plug? Because the songs he was writing didn’t chime with the music he heard in his head.
“I’d been repressing a part of myself and I needed to let it out,” he resumes. “So I found this place deep in the countryside, in rural Illinois about three hours from Chicago. There was a big barn there. I needed to indulge in the solitude and figure some things out for myself.”
He’s been going back to that same barn ever since. It was here he recorded new LP, Break It Yourself, perhaps his most soulful and beautiful collection yet. A record about loss, love and the tricks life pulls on us, it sees Bird in a relatively straight-ahead frame of mind, in contrast to his last few LPs which erred towards the indulgently avant-garde. Particularly memorable is a collaboration with St. Vincent’s Annie Clark, which came about when she spontaneously joined him on stage one night.
“She was supporting me. I’d written a song called ‘Lusitania’. It’s about drowning and maritime disaster. The track reveals itself to be a metaphor for wounded co-dependents, about how sometimes we need our enemies.
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