Chicago-based singer-songwriter Andrew Bird has seen his stock rise considerably over the past year, with sold out shows now a regular occurrence.

Indeed, such is his growing popularity, he'll be performing a second date in Dublin's Crawdaddy this month. His new album, Armchair Apocrypha, is a beguiling collection of atmospheric indie, and represents a significant stylistic shift for Bird, who up until recently had been noted for his idiosyncratic explorations of folk, blues and pre-war jazz and swing.
“In the last couple of years I’ve been stripping away the more stylised and theatrical elements,” acknowledges the soft-spoken Bird, down the line from Chicago. “Indie rock seems to be the style I’m associating myself with more these days, but I’m just staying true to what’s in my head. I still find I have to approach a song from seven different angles to see what’s gonna stick.
“In this case, working with (Minneapolis ambient guru) Martin Dosh, previously we’d only really scratched the surface of what we could do live, in terms of playing with loops and these intersecting circles of sound. So we tried to capture that on certain songs with what was very much a live approach. Other tunes I used a completely different process, where it was me playing most of the instruments.”
A virtuoso violinist, Andrew has contributed to records by an illustrious array of musicians over the years, including Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and The Handsome Family.
“A lot of that comes through a producer I know in Nashville called Mark Nevers,” he explains. “Mark produced Sings Greatest Palace Music, which Will Oldham asked me to play on. That was cool, he was a friendly and accessible guy. The Handsome Family still represent something important to me. I haven’t seen too much of them since they left Chicago, but they had a big influence on me. Their songs are great to cover because you can really reinterpret them, and the lyrics, although subtle, they’re just heartbreaking. They’re a reminder to me of what lyric writing is all about.”
On a less literary note, a recent appearance on children’s programme Jack’s Big Music Show in the States afforded Andrew the opportunity of performing alongside puppeteer David Rudman, aka the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.
“It was a total blast,” he enthuses. “It was me on the set with these two puppets and I had to interact with them. They had the same subtle facial expressions as the characters from Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, and I recognised that and got very into the whole alternate universe of puppets. There was someone else from Sesame Street too, I think she might have been Big Bird. They gave me a specific song which already had lyrics, and I had to write the music and arrange it in a jug band style. It was the perfect experience.”
Armchair Apocrypha gets a live airing at Crawdaddy, Dublin (March 19 & 21) and the Roisin Dubh, Galway (20)