Andrew Bird's masterful new album Break It Yourself finds the singular multi-instrumentalist songwriter at the height of his powers, striking a nearly perfect balance between his sophisticated, layered compositions and the looser feel of his mesmerizing live shows. The album, which you can and should purchase here, was the first Bird recording with his full band. Cut in two sessions in his barn outside Chicago, it seems the more collaborative recording process contributed to the album's seamless organic flow.
Break It Yourself grooves and swings more than Bird's recent records, and it's a delicious one to hear live, as we recently did when he performed it front to back at the Bell House in Brooklyn. If you missed that one, don't despair—there are still good tickets left for Bird & Co.'s two night stand at the Beacon on May 4th and 5th. We recently spoke with Bird by phone somewhere in Arizona, in the middle of his sprawling North American tour. During our candid conversation, Bird opened up about Break It Yourself, and how he put it all together.
What do you think went into this album that set it apart from your previous releases? Well, a number of things. It took a little more time between records, and I was pretty burnt out when I finished Noble Beast.
Because you were touring and recording pretty relentlessly for many years right? In pretty quick succession, yeah. Like, we'd finish a tour and knock out another record. We did that for about three or four records in a row, so it was time to take a step back, and I think it benefited from that. There was also just some positive things happening in my life, and I don't know, I think you can hear that. As the songs were being written you can almost hear a shift happening in the middle of the songs. The songs often start going down similar paths I've been on, and then a switch gets flipped halfway through.
I don't know how detectable that is. You hear it on "Eyeoneye" you hear it on "Lusitania"...and the way it was recorded was kind of unprecedented for me, and way more relaxed. We sort of tricked ourselves into making a record. It was not set up as "Hey, we're making the next record." We were just getting together to jam and hang out together as a band. They were relatively short, two sessions at my barn, a year apart. They were pretty quick and there was no time for self-doubt or neurosis seems to set in. We were just playing as a band.
(Cameron Wittig)
It is. In the past I've only been able to handle one band member at a time in the studio. I was coming out of a good eight years of working mostly by myself, and it would always seem like I was hosting a party when I was recording...in a bad way. So I wanted to just keep it minimal as far as who's in there with me.
And this one was just embracing the whole communal experience. We had a friend cook for us. We were all living under one roof, and it was just kind of a ten-day party, more or less. I think we caught the songs as they were coming together, so there was a nice loose feel and a sense that we're kind of groping around in the songs. There is a lot more wild soloing on this record as opposed to super distilled nuggets of ideas. This is more like the experimental feeling of improvising around a song, and that's what I like about this record, that you have some wild soloing next to some very direct songwriting and lyrics.
Some of the lyrics to me seem more personal. Some of them. Some of them are more personal or direct than we've heard from you. Do you share that assessment? Yeah, I think I knew that was happening as I was writing it. I think all of my songs—from the very beginning, from the first song I wrote when I was 18—they're all personal, almost equally personal. There's just how much I choose to disguise in wordplay. On this one, a lot of the songs are more close to the surface as far as the personal stuff.
As a fan, my sense is Andrew Bird's lyrics are really fascinating, but I've never really tried to figure out what they mean in terms of his personal life or things in the world. I'm just letting them wash over me and enjoying that fascinating wordplay. So then on this album, when there are moments where it seems more emotionally direct, it's all the more stunning, because it seems that there was this reticence all this time. Yeah, I suppose that can be true. Remember when your third-grade teacher suddenly lets down their guard and tells you a personal story, and everyone is on the edge of their seat?... I'm aware that in the past I've kind of gone out there with the lyrics for sure, and a lot of it is "how comfortable are you with the people who are in the room with you?" as you're writing your songs. How much do you want them to really know? [Laughs] It kind of leads to how much you cloak the lyrics. And then that cloaking leads to some really interesting words, in a whole different language. I guess this time I was just tired of the poetic, I wanted to just say it.
(Cameron Wittig)
Snake pit.
Where did that come from? That came from Jeremy, the guitarist. When you count off the song, after awhile "one-two-three-four" gets a little boring [laughs]. But yeah, I think it's from a band that he was in in Minneapolis. I kind of liked it. It was just a random thing, I didn't think it was going to wind up in there but it did. That whole song was kind of elusive and there were a lot of versions of it. It didn't really kick in until the final version went completely live with no overdubs. I think that's exactly how it went down.
It took me a long time to nail that song, but when we got that take we were doing it for the cameras, because during the second session we had a camera crew out there and we were just trying to get another angle. So again, almost everything we got was when we weren't really trying. About halfway through that song you hear us all collectively realize that this was happening and we all kind of went for it at the end. But I was always trying to get some kind of raw, real feeling with that song. In previous attempts to make it we added strings and everything and it just got too pretty and overproduced really quick without even trying. So I had to make an extra effort to make it a little uglier basically.
I was listening to a lot of late-seventies/early-eighties New York stuff, like Modern Lovers-type stuff to get that really amped-up, raw sound. I don't usually do that: seek out stuff from recent history as inspiration, but I always wondered how they got that sound, from Lou Reed on "Transformer" to The Modern Lovers there's some of the best of that electric sound. So anyway, the way to get it is to not care too much, I guess. [Laughs]
I remember the whole horrific Gulf Oil spill and writing about that as it was unfolding seemingly endlessly. Is it too much to draw a literal connection between your song "Hole in the Ocean Floor" and that? No that's precisely what it was about. And I wasn't going to put it on the record, because as a rule I don't like to write topical songs. But why not? I mean, one night I woke up in a cold sweat and it's just rare to have this disaster that is not a singular event, it's a continual thing. I just woke up in a panic, and it was like you can feel this collective roar of the city you're in and beyond that the whole planet. That was a pretty striking moment that I was compelled to write about.
It's funny, this song really isn't complete, it's just that with that idea, what else can you say about it? I got to a point with it where I realized it was just minimal lyrics, but that's all I had to say about it.
Yeah. I also love "Near Death Experience Experience." It's such a funny title and the lyrics are brilliant. "Used to be like toffee in a kitten's teeth" and then the chorus about how "we'll dance like cancer survivors," is just terrific. Yeah, that one had been germinating for years, just based on that thought that popped into my head when I was at a dance party in Chicago. There was a woman who was much older than everyone else there and no one was dancing and she had on this tight tie-dye dress and long white hair and she was just going for it in a way that just shamed everyone else.
The first thought I had was like "She must've just gotten the news that she is in remission or something," and I was so envious. That brings up the discussion of how can a perfectly healthy young person be envious of someone who has just survived a horrific thing like that. Obviously it's because there is no way to simulate a near-death experience and that is what the song is kind of puzzling through. If you knew that it was going to bring you closer to death it wouldn't work.
Speaking of sickness I saw that documentary about you, Fever Year, which I really enjoyed. Now you're touring and that film had a lot to do with you being sick and dealing with not feeling well, for lack of a better word. Are you feeling better on this tour, do you feel like you don't have the fever anymore? No! I've been sick for almost the whole two months that I've been out. It's just a weird thing, it's just how I know it to be, which is the theory that they bring up in the film, that maybe just performing every night changes your whole metabolism and your thyroid and all your glands are just squeezing to get the endorphins out and push through that show. Whatever that is changes your body temperature so you feel like you have a fever all the time. But you know [laughs] this is not supported by science.
Official Trailer (2:45) from Andrew Bird: Fever Year on Vimeo.
Yeah, I was gonna ask if you shared the theory with any medical professionals? I have, yeah. They just kind of look blankly at me [laughs]. But I think there has got to be something to that. It's just a strange thing to put your body through. It kind of seems like you would have a lot of down time on tour. Sometimes you do. But you do two-and-a-half hour sound checks, then a two-hour show and it's taking something from you, a little more than can be replaced... It can feed itself, but I think you can do it so much that it starts to tip the other way.
But I'm coming out of it and feeling better. And then there are other theories that maybe I need that adversity, the drive, in a way. I always need to feel like getting to that show and having it be good is some sort of miraculous thing. Anyway, it's not a near-death experience, but I sure do appreciate when I am healthy and I'm bouncing off the walls when I finally pull it together.
Is that film ever going to be released? I'm just taking some time to get some distance from it, because the making of it was so difficult and painful. So I need a little more time to see really what it is and then decide if it's going to get a wider release. People have seen the documentary as this sort of definitive document, I guess, and I'm not sure if I'm as comfortable with it as that. We'll see. It's gotten a nice reception.
Out of curiosity, it seems like there's a child in the background in "Polynation," is that intentional or is that accidental? Who's kid is it? It's my son, who is one now. I was writing the song for this group that was creating a spectacle involving a whale and I was supposed to do a duet with this giant whale on bicycles, and I was writing "The Whale Song" and I was watching Sam at the same time. And I was just trying to do a demo of that idea, and he got on there. And I just thought it was the perfect segue from "Desperation" to "Danse Caribe," talking about the shameless child.
Okay, last question. It seems like almost every time I see you in New York there's like one guy requesting "Dear Dirty". Do you ever get tired of requests ? Are you ever going to just play that song again? I love to play that song. It's really fun to play. I'm not aware of that request being that common but I always try to oblige requests. The thing is, once you open up that door at a show, the dynamic of the audience changes dramatically and everyone thinks they have full permission to curate the show themselves. It's a fine line. I do like to oblige and I like to have to think on my feet and try to do something we didn't play. But yeah, that gives me the idea to resurrect that one.
