Autumn De Wilde
Inara George
The Bird and the Bee frontwoman talks about the duo’s new album, love for L.A., and her future plans
By Cortney Harding
Published: February 5th, 2007 | 4:52pm
"In all honesty, we just made the record for fun,” says Inara George, one-half of the buzzed-about Tropicalia-pop duo the Bird and the Bee.
Speaking from her kitchen in Los Angeles, George sounds remarkably relaxed for a woman who has been talking to reporters all day. George says the duo’s latest, self-titled album took three years to create because it was mostly made when she and Greg Kurstin had spare moments. “I would call Greg, and if we were both free, we would get together at his house and record,” George says. “If you compressed all the time it took, I’d say it was about two weeks.”
George met Kurstin — who is responsible for all the instruments on the new record — while she was working on her first solo record, 2005’s All Rise. “I had been playing music since I was 18 in all sorts of bands,” she says. “I was in a band, Lode, for a while. We got signed to Geffen and then got dropped pretty quickly, which was fine, because we all had such different tastes. I played around for a while after that, and was in a duo that put out two self-released albums, but nothing ever really broke.”
After the release of All Rise, George finally found an audience, due largely to the amount of airplay she received on Los Angeles station KCRW’s influential Morning Becomes Eclectic show.
George says she thinks the Bird and the Bee sounds totally different from her solo work. “I’m always confused when people say that they can’t really tell the difference,” she says. “The Bird and the Bee is a whole different project, not just an extension of my other work. I mean, my voice is still my voice, but the records are otherwise not really alike.”
All Rise is a mellow collection of modern-day Laurel Canyon psychedelic folk songs, the Bird and the Bee sounds like the soundtrack to a retro Brazilian film. For an album that was recorded in fits and starts, it flows together remarkably well; every song fits into part of a larger narrative. The record also received a strange boost in the fall of 2006 when the breakout track, “Fucking Boyfriend,” grabbed the number-one spot on Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play chart. Lyrically, the tracks on the record deal mostly with the ins and outs of love and relationships. “Fucking Boyfriend” tells a story of a boy who won’t commit, while “I’m a Broken Heart” is about, well, take a guess. Elsewhere, tracks like “I Hate Camera” take on the shutterbug-obsessed L.A. nightlife, and “Preparedness” discusses an impending atomic explosion.
George is no stranger to heartbreak herself. While she tends to remain mum about her personal life, it’s well known that she lost her father — Lowell George, who was the frontman of the band Little Feat — at a young age. While she doesn’t participate in any of his famous drug-fueled wild-man antics, she does share his love for her hometown, Los Angeles — especially the music scene. She mentions that she enjoys being able to play shows with the surrounding talent naming friend and producer Mike Andrews as well as Becky Stark from Lavender Diamond. George also credits the L.A. weather for creating part of her sound. “Being from California definitely makes you see things in a different way,” she says. “I hope I’m never being too conscious about it, never saying, ‘I’m going to make an L.A. record.’ But I am very open to my surroundings.”
George might be in for a change of scenery sometime soon. “We’re working on putting together a U.K. tour,” she says. When asked about her plans for the future, she mentions that she is busy recording her second solo album and that she and Kurstin are also working on another record. “We started in the spring and we have 11 songs done. We need about two more weeks to finish it completely.” She laughs, “One concept we’ve been talking about is a Christmas record, because we’ll have plenty of time to record it before the holidays.”
Issue #35
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