Andrew Bird Issue #31

One of Chicago’s biggest talents addresses damage control on Armchair Apocrypha

By Kristina Francisco
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

“I was a pretty serious kid,” said Andrew Bird, over lunch on a sunny January day in Chicago. “I’m a lot less serious than I was. It’s a matter of degrees, I guess.”

It was evident during our meal at Chicago’s Lula Cafe that Bird is not only serious but also soft-spoken. During our one-hour conversation over butternut-squash soup to talk about his third solo album, Armchair Apocrypha, it was difficult to hear him over the din of the dining room.

“I wanted to go to one of these really serious, dark, hallowed halls–type schools, where there are no fraternities or sororities,” said Bird, who attended the Northwestern University School of Music to study violin, an instrument he’d been playing since he was 4. “I had this very romantic notion at that time of being an artist. I wish I hadn’t taken it so seriously, but I wasn’t finding much socially that was doing it for me, so I just holed up in the practice room.”

When Bird graduated in 1995, he taught violin — jazz, Irish, and gypsy music — for years, crisscrossing town and playing eight hours a day until he felt like he was beginning to hate what he loved. He also released Music of Hair, in 1996, an album he recorded in independent-study courses during his last two years of college and toured with his band, Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire. Touring saved him physically because he only had to play two hours a day. Five years ago, he renovated a barn on his family’s farm in Western Illinois, turning it into his recording studio and home.

Now, more than a decade after college, Bird lives in Chicago, finally having the means to afford a place in the city after the barn renovation. The isolation of the country was vital to his first two solo albums, 2003’s Weather Systems and 2005’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs, and Bird still writes and records there. His latest, Armchair Apocrypha, is much like its predecessors, full of beautiful arrangements where Bird turns himself into a small orchestra, buoyed by his violin and voice.

And like Weather Systems and Mysterious Production, the lyrics on Armchair are often enigmatic, with only a few words decipherable at first, which, Bird said, keeps his music alive and interesting. His songs don’t tell stories, but rather, they address subjects. “I mean, sometimes I’ll get fixated on something, whether it be the idea of dark matter in the universe … there are definitely certain themes,” Bird said. “There’s a song on the new record [“Heretics”] when I’m talking about how we seek to get credit for being self-destructive. After doing 230 days on the road last year, I thought, ‘Jesus, I’ve gotta be doing damage to myself,’ and when I did do damage to myself, I thought, ‘Jeez, I hope I get some credit for this.’ So I wrote that [song] taking imagery from medieval torture — just obscure torture devices like the little thumb clamp or how they would drill holes through people’s tongues.”

Bird’s lyrics often contain vivid imagery, yet he’s conscious not to get too dark. “I think my songs are a lot more playful and weird,” he said. “They might address some apocalyptic theme, but in a playful, let’s-have-fun-with-it [way]. From the beginning, I’ve always wanted to play those off each other.”

With this album complete, Bird is already thinking about the next album and touring. “I’ve always been working toward this goal where I wanna be able to play anywhere in the world where I have a respectable audience, and it might actually start to be a reality, which is now frightening,” he said. “I just played a show at a college in Vermont [and] this student came up to me and said, ‘Why do you do this? Why don’t you just play classical music?’ No one’s really asked me that, and I was like, ‘Well, I don’t know. What I’m doing with this just feels right, vital, and real. I don’t think I could sustain it any other way.’”