There has been so much to blog about recently—so much that i’ve had a hard time deciding what to write about first. So, i guess I should do it chronologically…
Andrew Bird Concert in Lawrence, KS @ Liberty Hall, 3/16/09, w/ my reflections on music-making
First, lemme say a few things about my devotion to Andrew Bird: The first time I heard about Andrew Bird was on the music download site eMusic, as his disc “Armchair Apocrypha” was a much lauded download. When I checked out the few 10 second snippets I could listen to, I thought it sounded novel and I was impressed such an artist had found his way onto one of my all-time fave labels, Fat Possum Records. That Oct ’07, I decided to buy the record because he was going to be opening for the greatest touring band alive, Wilco, when we would go see them in Omaha, NE.
We gave Armchair Apocrypha a casual listen on our drive to Omaha and thought it was pretty decent, and gave us some idea of what to expect from Mr. Bird. When he opened for Wilco that night, he was solo: Bird, voice, violin, guitar, glockenspiel, and some nice looping and octave pedals.
He played and we spent the rest of the evening trying to get our jaws from off of the floor. He was simply sublime AND transcendent 😉 One man filled the Orpheum with such beautiful sounds. Truly, a performer you don’t want to miss live.
When I listened to the record again the next day, realizing that this wasn’t just a guy with a great backing band (apologies to Dosh), but an auteur with help from Martin Dosh on percussion, the record really came alive for me and spent the next few months in the CD player with Wilco, Nels Cline, Dinosaur Jr. and Weird Tales by Golden Smog (some pretty good company).
I love that about live performances. They can bring your appreciation of a recording artist to a new level. I would’ve frozen Andrew Bird as a songwriter of novel songs and nice melodies instead of revering him as the brilliant multi-instrumentalist, purveyor of beautiful and mellifluous vocabulary, and guy I would like to sit and have a dinner-that-turns-into-a-jam-session with.
Anyway, accompanied by my musician friends Tim (go check out Tim’s band here) and Crocker ( a violinist who can appreciate Bird in a way I can’t) and my lovely wife (who blogged about the performance here), we got to see Mr. Bird and his new backing band. I was a little worried that something would be lost in translation from on-man-band to guy-with-a-stellar-backing-band.
Fears? Quelled. He started out and ended the show solo, doing his looping thing. Awesome. Then the other players came out, including the brilliant Martin Dosh, and it was really something to behold. The virtuosity mixed with showmanship and low-art-crowd-involvement was great.
But it was more than a great show. It was a lesson to me as a musician. When the Birdman first showed up, he went into one of those rapturous string-and-whistle loops that I had never heard before in any of his catalogue, but proceeded to use the loops as the bedrock for one his most familiar songs. A song in which the core of the song is held in place by a strummed guitar now is completely being held together by ambient strings and reverb-drenched whistles.
This is something that I am constantly marveling at when I listen to Bird (cue “need for a psychologist re: my attitudes toward music creation”). The seemingly complex can be broken down into very simple parts that can stand on their own. The chord voicings are common, as are the progressions. Most songs vacillate between only two or three chords, which are almost unrelated to the melody. And, while in one of his compositions there may be many tracks contributing, there still seems to be sonic breathing room—one never feels like they must come up for air from the ultra-dense frequencies (ala My Bloody Valentine, or any number Phil Spector recordings, both of which i adore). He makes the mundane interesting, and bends the simple into the captivating. I want to do that.
So, confession: while I love making and writing music, I really have no clue as to how to do it with any coherence. I have no formal training, and all of my music theory comes from what (little bit) I understand about the guitar. I used to think this was a valuable component when writing music, as my options would be limitless because I had no regard for the rules of music I didn’t know.
I don’t feel that way anymore. I am reminded of Stravinsky who saw freedom in the rules, and Cummings, who knew the rules of poetry so well that when he broke them, he did so with such virtuosity that it could really move the reader’s spirit.
But learning how to make music the “correct” way seems too hard, like an old dog learning new tricks or a person in physical therapy re-learning to do something that used to be second nature. But great art can come from traveling through adversity. Like my current-state’s motto: “ad astra per aspera.”
Aw, thanks for honestly sharing your passions. I hadn’t heard your reflections on the Bird show. So nice.
“He makes the mundane interesting, and bends the simple into captvating.” I love that. To me that is one of art’s greatest powers. And I whole heartedly agree, that is what makes Bird’s music so enthralling.
I really, really should have gone to that concert. That’s the last time I ever let a crappy opening act (or were they a co-headliner?) influence my decision to skip out on a concert.
I find writing about music to be incredibly hard, but I you did a wonderful job here and I thoroughly enjoyed reading your thoughts.
wow, well, thanks, Mr. Gach! I hope you’ll stop by again sometime.