Free As A Bird

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.
“A lot of the songs on the album feel as if they were almost written as duets. So I showed her the lyrics on tour and, one night, we jumped up together and sang it. It was a pretty amazing moment. We were a bit shaky during the performance – something about the dialogue between those two people fed into the nervousness of the song.”
If Bird is known for anything outside his (not insubstantial) fanbase, it’s his use of looping. Years before KT Tunstall and Bon Iver, he was building songs out of layered fragments of violin – which he sometimes plucks like an acoustic guitar – and multi-track vocals. It’s a haunting effect and endlessly inventive too, with Bird reluctant to repeat the same pattern. For that reason, no two of his performances are ever the same.
“All the people I play with… we all come from jazz backgrounds,” he avers. “We play by ear and are kind of restless. Even though I’m doing pop songs, there is a lot of improvisation. It keeps it interesting. I try my hardest to resist the inevitable patterns of muscle memory that sometimes kick in.
“The worst thing that can happen to a musician is that you either feel you’re phoning it in or you’re getting burnt out. I hate when I go to bands that I love and nothing surprises me – where everything that was supposed to happen happens. That was one of the things that led me away from classical music and into folk. Ultimately I found that restricting too so I ended up doing pop. You go to one of our shows and you don’t get our latest record presented on a plate. I would like to think it’s a lot looser than that.”
Belying his grave demeanour, one of Bird’s best loved songs is his cover of Kermit The Frog’s ‘It Isn’t Easy Being Green’ (he was onto the Muppets revival thing waaaay before your hipster pals). When he heard a big-screen reboot of the franchise was in the works, he was determined to get some of his music into the film. With Flight Of The Conchord’s Brett McKenzie already on board as tunesmith, this was an uphill push. Still, he got there in the end.
“I offered myself as a songwriter. I wrote a bunch of songs based on the script. I’m a huge fan of the Muppets. Also I needed to write songs that weren’t personal for a while. It was all speculative. It’s pretty hard to get your songs in there. However, they did use a whistling aria I composed on the credits.”
Some songwriters chaff within the boundaries of movie writing. Bird, however, had a grasp of what he was letting himself in for.
“It wasn’t so bad because I respected the director,” he says. ‘I knew what they were going for comedy wise. I liked being one of those Tin Pan alley type songwriters for a while. Where they go: ‘Guys, we need a song about prohibition in half an hour! It’s nice to get outside your own head for a while.”
Bird has lived in Chicago for most of his career. Though America’s third-largest city is a megalopolis of ten million souls, in entertainment industry circles Chicago is regarded as somewhat of a backwater. When his career was talking off, Bird had to step back and consider if he was hobbling himself by staying put. In the end, he decided whatever benefits might accrue from moving to LA or New York wouldn’t justify the downside.
“When I was around 28 most of my fellow musicians were going to the coasts,” he recalls. “They were ambitious. That’s when I went deeper into the midwest. For me, it doesn’t make sense to chose my environment to suit my career. You should chose your environment for personal reasons. If I went to an urban centre where people are because that’s where the ‘shit is happening’ …well I wouldn’t find that the most socially interesting place to me.
“Chicago has been incredibly supportive to me as I try to figure out what kind of songwriter I want be. It’s nice to be in a community where you get a lot of backing and yet, at the same time, nobody is coming to your show because they are interested in signing you or putting you on TV. That sort of environment would make you go into lock down a little bit.”

Break It Yourself is out now. You can see him as part of the Electric Picnic.