Ahead of revisiting The Mysterious Production of Eggs with a full orchestra, the violinist and songwriter takes Bruno Bridger through the pivotal songs in his life.
Sometime in the early 2000s, Andrew Bird left Chicago for the valleys and prairieland of Western Illinois and set about renovating a dilapidated barn.
In between sessions of drywalling, this new geographical vantage point induced both revelation and for Bird, “a different measurement for how you experience time”. Amongst the wide-open spaces of the Midwest, the genesis of 2005’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs was formed.
By the time Bird left Chicago, the cities music scene had become a hotbed of radical improvisation, innovation and competing sonic philosophies. While the likes of Gastr Del Sol, Tortoise and the Sea and Cake, informally dubbed the Chicago School of Post Rock, had crafted a sound equally as indebted to bossa nova as it was to Slint, producers such as Steve Albini had implemented widely adopted, bare-bones recording philosophies that read like emphatic treatises on proper approaches to instrumentation.
Looking beyond any stringent musical manifestos and philosophies, Bird’s music has always seemed built around an intuitive, playful opposition to any idea of established musical rules and boundaries. While raised primarily around classical music, Bird’s Suzuki training, an immersive teaching methodology built on the notion of teaching music from an early age by ear, whereby, as he explains, it becomes a “mother tongue”, has given him an approach to music composition and consumption whereby his ear had always learnt faster than his brain.
“I guess I was always more cut-out for the oral tradition” Bird tells me from his house in California when we sit down to discuss his Nine Songs selections, or what Bird lovingly refers to as his predisposition for music with a “populist bent”, a suggestion of the deep extent to which Bird’s song choices overwhelmingly favour a democratic approach to musical interpretation.
While Beethoven’s concertos, in their initial simplicity, provided him early on with the broad ‘crucible’ for which to expand his capabilities beyond the excessive technicality of the classical world, the narcotic sensibilities of swing have expanded his often chorus-less songwriting through the use of the thirty-two bar formula.
Indeed, throughout our discussion, a trend emerges of music and musicians that often possess origins and roots that lie far beyond what is understood to be their genre or scene.
Some of Bird’s formative influences include classical symphonies that borrow from French folk and civil-war themed Anglo-Irish trad, which is equally as indebted to an early life in orchestras as it is to informal pub sessions. As we speak his choices seem to paint a potted history of recorded music that is defined by ideas, structures and sounds that seem to build on one another over the course of time.
Bird’s last two projects, both of which have been cover albums of sorts, one a track-by track interpretation of Buckingham Nicks with Madison Cunningham, aptly titled Cunningham Bird, and Sunday Morning Put-On, an album of Jazz vocal standards, reveal him as a musician still fascinated by how the past affords us the chance to expand the margins of interpretation.
In incorporating Trad-Folk, Jazz or the Blues, Bird’s musical tastes mirror his own music’s preoccupation with songs that serve as blueprints for constant reinvention, or rather resemble that which he admires the most about the classical works of Beethoven, song forms whereby “the architecture is complex but the building blocks are very simple”.
When we discuss how he feels re-visiting The Mysterious Production of Eggs in full for the first time in over a decade, it’s fitting that he is most struck by its meticulous and layered production process, one that he explains as, “every song is a little universe of sketches’ and you would ‘peel back one layer and then layer another right back on top of it”.
Understanding Bird’s pursuit of tweaking and reinventing existing sounds and formulas into increasingly exciting shapes seems to underline his choice to once again rub shoulders with the classical world on his upcoming tour. Bird will be revisiting his canonical album for its 20th anniversary, over two decades after leaving the world of classical music and orchestra’s behind.
Choosing to perform the album live with the Britten Sinfonia, a chamber orchestra, may seem to be almost a left-field choice, given his decision to exit the classical world, and his previously fractured relationship with its musical and social dynamics, but Bird understands it as offering a new interpretation of the songs that lends itself to the complex counterpoints and structures that define the albums identity.
At the time, Bird reveals that he saw the album as his ‘headphone masterpiece’ and upon initially taking it on tour with the “agile operation” of himself and a drummer, recreating the albums detailed studio sound proved challenging, forcing new contortions and interpretations of the arrangements.
“Live we just had to make it work. I was touring so much and playing so many shows, I had so much commitment to that life that it really got wild and ecstatic on stage”. It makes perfect sense then, that one of the most viewed videos of Bird on the internet is a freewheeling live interpretation of "A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left" at Bonnaroo, with Bird seemingly floating across the stage in a trance-state, a song that he tells me, that is inherently about the struggles of life on the road, of feeling “so gutted and ridiculously tired that you look like a crazy person in the airport”.
While he maintains that every successive album has taken a more considered approach to how it might be realised in a live setting, he admits that the prospect of reinterpreting the whole of The Mysterious Production of Eggs, top-to bottom in an orchestral setting, is a rather exciting project. “It’s kind of a trip. With fifty musicians on stage you can finally do all those intricate parts and it’s a totally different beast”.
The prospect of reinterpretation and reinvention, adjacent to the classical world of his youth, seems fitting for a musician influenced by the margins between genres and interpretation and who has a knack for imbuing new musical contexts with radical energy.
“It would be great to also get that to feel freewheeling, it can be pretty seat of the pants. Not only are all these people on stage with you but some are fifty feet away from you, – it’s definitely wild in its own way”.
“Go Tell Aunt Rhody” by Suzuki Violin School: Volume 1
BEST FIT: You grew up learning music through the Suzuki method, right? Is this seen as the entry level, beginner Suzuki song?
ANDREW BIRD: It’s the second piece after “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”. What’s kind of interesting is that the whole idea of the Suzuki method is that it’s like a mother tongue. You learn Suzuki like how you would learn a language. By ear. It’s really interesting that the first volume of music you learn is a mix of classical and folk tunes.
That piece seems to be taken originally from an operatic or classical piece and has been later adapted into the folk tradition. That almost feels like a thesis statement on the Suzuki method itself?
In this case, this song is a folk tune. And really, a lot of these songs, are just melodies and what Suzuki ingrained in me was a sense of learning totally by ear, almost like in the oral tradition, like folk music. Even though it might be Mozart or Bach that you’re learning, you’re still processing it like you would at a folk session in a pub.
Beginning with “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” most of what I was hearing early on in my life were these volumes of Suzuki method, at least for the first couple years of playing music.
It was only around the age of thirteen or fourteen when I started playing violin concertos, which I was still playing mostly by ear, when I began to play this Beethoven violin concerto that became the soundtrack to my coming of age and the burgeoning drama of my teenage years.
“Violin Concerto” by Beethoven
What’s interesting about this piece, is that it’s part of what they call the ‘Warhorse concertos’, which are all characterised by having these difficult technical passages. What was distinct about this Beethoven piece was that on the surface it’s not full of flashy technicality.
At music school there was a lot of talk about the difference between people who were technically good but not very musical, and people who were naturally musical but not always technical.
I was always told I was musical but that I still needed to practice my scales, that I was not that disciplined or methodical. So hearing this Beethoven piece that was on another level of musical sophistication, where you don’t need to rely on flashy passages to be great. Even though it’s still incredibly hard to play, it became my crucible, to think that someday I would maybe be able to master this piece.
There are passages that are not on the surface very difficult, but you can keep playing them over and over for days and still not really ‘get it’. It’s a deep well compared to the other Warhorse concertos.
Did you ever feel like you got there with this piece. Like you were a master of it?
I never performed it live in front of an audience. I just kept coming back to it and beating my head against it, trying to absorb it. I even came back to it, thirty years after leaving classical music, to see if I could hack it.
How was it coming back to it?
I mean, I got close, but it still sits there on my piano. It’s a lifetime project.
There are interesting dynamics at play with that piece, and a lot of different approaches to playing it, where you could go for quite a stripped back approach or really symphonic.
I am definitely drawn to pieces that are not too descriptive on how they should be played. This piece definitely feels more like a blueprint. I’ve even thought about deconstructing the piece and treating it like a pop tune. All the themes are so simple. It’s like when you think about Beethoven’s Fifth, it’s built around those four notes. The architecture of the song is complex but the building blocks are very simple.
I was never approaching music like a typical classical musician. I never conformed to the typical expectations of classical music. The hierarchical structure of it was never meant for me. I always loved the drama and the melodies. Like I said, for the teenage years, what is a more dramatic soundtrack than this music? Everything is so much more heightened and vivid.
With the classical pieces I’ve chosen; I know it may seem as if they’re a world away culturally but I still evaluate certain classical pieces today and think, ‘That’s just a banger that’s got it all’.
“Catch the Wind” by Donovan
Moving on from your teenage years, Donovan is when you’re entering adulthood? Is this when you feel like you’re moving away from the classical world?
I chose this song really because it was the soundtrack to my first heartbreak. I had been dumped and the melancholy of that song, particularly some of the lyrics like, ‘In the chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty / I want to be in the warm hold of your loving mind’, I found them incredibly emotional and sad.
Was this heartbreak your introduction to Donovan?
In high school I fell in with the both the hippy art kids and the goth art kids, we’ll get to the goth part later, but together we would play Donovan songs. We had this little ensemble that was semi-orchestral and we would play songs like “Jennifer Juniper”, it was that awkward high school period of trying different things on, like wearing vests and vintage clothes.
Donovan would be quite an accessible, emblematic figure to grasp on to when you’re young and forming your musical identity. He has this lullaby-like, timeless approach to lyrics
It’s the same thing with The Kinks, who I got into a little later in my life , and whose music overall I dig more than Donovan’s, but I ended up picking this one because it so strongly represents that time and period in my life.
There’s only one song that I associated with that heartbreak, and there’s only one time that that happens in your life.
“Monkey Gone to Heaven” by Pixies
All through high school I wasn’t completely in a vacuum with pop culture, but it was definitely on the periphery, like I said earlier, when I had fallen in with the hippy art kids and the goth art kids, more so the goths, and at that time in the early ‘90s, labels like 4AD and Beggars Group were huge.
I’d been given a mixtape from a girlfriend that had “Monkey Gone to Heaven” on it. And I picked this song out because it scared me and unnerved me. At the time I actually thought it was industrial music. I thought it was like Ministry or something like that. I wasn’t aware of the other songs on Doolittle, I just had this mixtape with This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins and this one Pixies song on it.
It was the first time something made me feel this coldness in my heart, in an alluring way (laughs). There are very few tunes that you hear as you get older that can still scare you or creep you out. It was similar to the first time I had heard The Velvet Underground and I was thinking, ‘something’s not right about this’.
Frank Black and Lou Reed have always been these pretty imposing figures, especially when your young and getting into music. In particular when you listen to Frank Black’s voice, it’s so outside of what you come to expect from indie rock.
It’s similar to what a lot of metal was doing for kids in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It was saying ‘Don’t fuck with me, I’m into scary shit’. It’s funny as well, because a lot of guys like Frank Black seemed to almost transition into the Americana scene later on, and a lot of my twenties was spent around the Alt-Country scene, where there’s this big crossover between classic country and the heavier, darker stuff.
“Ashokan Farewell” by Jay Ungar
I wanted to ask you more about this time in your twenties in Chicago and growing up around all those different scenes, what was that like? I guess it brings us to Jay Ungar?
Around 18, 19, 20, I was listening to NPR a lot in the States, around the same time the Ken Burns Civil War series came out and the theme song, “Ashokan Farewell”, is this Anglo-Irish sounding, yet also American sounding simple folk tune written by Jay Ungar, who lived in the Woodstock area.
He was part of this group of folk musicians a generation older than me, who would play folk music, as well as some swing and acoustic stuff, and they would also run these fiddle and dance camps in the area.
I picked this tune because it felt like at this time in my life, that it became my tune, it had this populist appeal. It is the first tune I would play for people in group situations. I played it at every wedding, every funeral. I was playing weddings at this particular church in Chicago, and I had suggested it as a processional, and I ended up playing it more than any other song.
It always worked for a ceremonial situation. It always moved people to tears and I never really got tired of playing it. It was never a chore. I was in my first year of music school and I had this Russian teacher, who was extremely corrupt (laughs), and I had decided to play “Ashokan Farewell” and he got really mad at me. He was like, ‘Why are you playing this lowbrow piece? All you want is applause’.
Long story short, I ended up leaving school because of him, but that another story. When I was 17 or 18 I ended up driving out to go to one of these fiddle and dance camps to learn from Jay Ungar, because I was so into this acoustic scene.
What’s interesting is that there seems to be this theme whereby in your youth you’re seeking new ways of consuming and learning music outside of the Classical set-up. Then you’re seeking out these alternate forms of education through fiddle music and all of these separate scenes.
Even just discovering a different social atmosphere to that of the orchestra was exciting. What I observed in orchestras was that everyone was good at their specific job, it was very hierarchical, but they are not often consumed with the fire of passionate artistic struggle. If everyone was, it wouldn’t work.
I noticed that in orchestra’s you learn how to play the notes you’re supposed to play, the conductor is the dictator of all of that and beyond that you’re free to just be a normal, boring person. I just remember thinking; ‘This is not my scene.’ I started going to Irish folk sessions, which definitely had their own hierarchy, but had a much more relaxed atmosphere.
Do you think a lot of these impulses to avoid these constrictive environments come from how you were taught music through the Suzuki method?
I literally could not read music until I started high school and started jumping into orchestras. People still knock Suzuki because they don’t teach people how to read music. There’s still this assumption that reading music is music. That reading music is the point.
I eventually did learn to read, but my ear could always learn faster than my brain. It always seemed as if I was cut out for a more oral tradition.
"For the Sake of the Song" by Townes Van Zandt
Identifying yourself within the oral tradition leads us to your Americana and folk influences in terms of songwriting. You covered “If I Needed You” on Hands of Glory, what’s your relationship to Townes music?
It took me a long time to really hear the lyrics of a song and to relate to what the songwriter is saying, to think they are talking about something that I am dealing with myself. It made me think ‘Oh shit, is that the way most people are listening to songs?’
Up until I heard these Townes Van Zandt songs, particularly ‘For the Sake of the Song’, I really felt as if I had been there, as a touring musician and always leaving home and having to keep up a relationship during all of that.
Never has a song narrated something so accurately for me that way. This is only recently, in the last five to ten years really, where I have been drawn to this sort of songwriting. You can’t have everything between ages sixteen to twenty two!
As a musician do you have a particular interest in these figures like Townes Van Zandt, who have a lot of mystique surrounding them, in terms of also being interested in their biographies and creative processes?
I’ve heard a little bit about him, but it’s mostly about the sad struggles with alcoholism. In terms of associating an artist’s vices and struggles with their music, that’s something I used to go in for, but as a songwriter, in terms of the creative process, generally you write better work when you’re fully with it.
There are obviously times when you’re in an altered state, whether that be from tiredness or fatigue, not so much substances, when this lucid flow state comes out, and humour or dark weird thoughts come out, but mostly as a songwriter you need to be filled with hope and excitement to write good stuff.
“Elder Green Blues” by Charley Patton
Charley Patton is talked about so much as an influence in the world of folk and blues, and it could be argued that he represents the opposite of what you mentioned about the relatable appeal of Townes Van Zandt, in that the allure resides in filling in the interpretive gaps?
I don’t come from a typical musical trajectory and my relationship with lyrics usually tends to be towards the cryptic or the ambiguous, in terms of what it is that I respond to.
That’s what initially drew me to people like Charley Patton, because it’s about trying to decipher meaning - its cryptic, it’s mysterious and you don’t ever really understand it. You can barely hear what the hell he’s saying through the static of the transfer from the wax cylinder.
Did you feel as if this cryptic sensibility is unique to the Blues?
To me, the Blues feels like it’s a whole other universe musically, with a different feeling and emphasis on the beat. In the Blues the beat gets turned around and the phrases are also not eight bar phrases a lot of the time. Often the singer will just come in with the next verse whenever or wherever the hell they feel like it.
The music is not conforming to Western expectations, and that’s also a big part of what drew me to it.
“This Years Kisses” by Lester Young
Lester Young had a similar effect to Townes Van Zandt, where I stopped trying to analyse and decipher what I was listening to and instead just let it be transcendent and wash over me.
There was this particular period in my twenties, when I was living in this tiny apartment in Chicago and listening to the Blues Before Sunrise radio show all night, which was all ‘78s, and then on the Sunday afternoon there would be a classic jazz show where you would hear a lot of Lester Young.
I bought this album from the Mid-50s which is late-career Lester Young, and on the album he’s so languid and narcotic sounding, the phrasing is so behind the beat, I don’t even think of it as jazz anymore. What he’s doing is something else, it’s so simple yet so impossible to achieve.
It’s so different to how I approached music like Beethoven, where it felt it had to be conquered, I was fine with accepting that I may never ‘get this’ and instead just let it wash over me. I still listen to that record a couple times a month.
A lot of critics feel Lester Young was rejecting the Post-Bop and Hard-Bop sensibilities of the time. Jazz is often viewed through these distinct movements and moments in time, and Lester Young doesn’t really fit that overarching narrative or interpretation of Jazz.
Yes, there’s that idea of Jazz as part of a canon or an evolutionary tree, where everyone is pushing each other and challenging one another to go into uncharted territory.
Am I correct in saying that Swing had a big influence on you when you recorded The Mysterious Production of Eggs?
A little before that, it was more from around the age of twenty-two to thirty, and by the time I had got to Eggs I had kind of moved on from that phase, but I still write a lot of songs in the thirty-two bar formula. I do write songs with choruses too, but it always happens by accident.
Lester Young, particularly this album, definitely inspired Sunday Morning Put-On, with that sentiment of, ‘Maybe after all these years of listening, I finally have something interesting to say’. It was a bit of a sabbatical project where I was able to immerse myself in the music and become a stronger improviser.
I thought I would make just an instrumental jazz record, but when I started singing, the same pop-impulses came over me to deliver a concise song. I guess that brings us back to my populist impulse.
“Symphony No.3” by Henryk Górecki
Górecki has had a significant influence on the non-classical world, with artists from Goldie to Sigur Rós citing him as an influence. Do you feel there’s something about his music that is particularly affective for musicians who aren’t necessarily operating in the classical music space?
When I lived in the country and fixed up this barn, around the time that I was recording The Mysterious Production of Eggs and Weather Systems, this piece coincided with entering this more experimental phase and beginning to re-structure the way I hear and think of music, and also when I began making these minimalist loops.
It’s a piece that, regardless of whatever you’re doing when you hear it, it makes time slow down in a profound way, at least it does so for me. I think for anyone with a soul it would have that effect. It’s a bit like “Adagio for Strings” and a lot of songs that are used in films when there is a ‘come to Jesus moment’ and everything slows down. It has that distinct effect where it changes how you perceive time within your particular environment.
Being out in the country and in nature, I was making these loops and I was looking to create the same effect as the one produced by this piece, with these suspensions, which were really influenced by the soprano voice in this symphony, where there’s these tense notes that ring out.
That was a huge influence for me on Weather Systems and The Mysterious Production Of Eggs, and also the song “Armchairs”, I was really trying to create that sound of the harp and the piano and the strings creating an attack, this beam of sound that he creates.
It’s similar to the Beethoven piece, where I would put on my headphones and it would be the soundtrack to the traumatic teenage years, similarly this piece really had an influence on my mid to late twenties and what I was doing at that time in my life.
You mention this rural space you found yourself in. Did this influence the sort of sounds and influences you were seeking out, especially having just left Chicago?
Chicago was a great place for living on the cheap, experiencing live music and having a community, but to suddenly go out to the country and to be out there for weeks on end, you really had to slow down.
The environment was this in this valley you could see a storm coming and you’d think ‘That’s probably going to come through and rain on me’ and then it rains on you and then it moves on.
It reminded me of when I went to Ireland for a few weeks when I was younger and it would happen all the time. It creates a different measurement of how you experience time. I had those revelations at different points, but I was always early on drawn to the idea of scoring and how music interacts with what it is that you’re seeing.
I had been living in a neighbourhood of Chicago that hadn’t changed much since the ‘30s and ‘40s, going to places like The Green Mill and playing the jukebox that plays 45s’, it’s hard not to get totally enchanted by that stuff, when you’re listening to radio shows that play old 78s.
I was in that world mostly in my twenties. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties and got out of the city that I started to unpack it all and have less of my original songs be dictated by nostalgia or my record collection. I had a lot more of my collective experience to draw from, so getting out of the city was important to getting some space and unpacking it all.
When I was out there drywalling this barn and doing these mundane tasks, I only had two albums with me, neither of which are on my list, but they very well could have been. Low’s Trust and The Kinks, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society’.
Ending up with The Mysterious Production of Eggs, The Kinks now actually makes a lot of sense to me. Every song is a little universe of these sketches.
Andrew Bird and Britten Sinfonia perform The Mysterious Production of Eggs at The Barbican 28 February
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