Watch the birdy

Published on Wednesday 23 April 2008 19:27

YOU don't need to watch an episode of Child Genius to appreciate the too-much-too-young perils of hothousing talented kids but Chicago-based instrumentalist Andrew Bird, all grown up now in his thirties, is here to prove that, if nurtured responsibly, a life-long immersion in music can produce the most captivating, creative, progressive art.

Bird has been producing his own albums for the past ten years, finally garnering a wider audience with his 2005 release, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, but he has been something of a violin prodigy since his pre-school days, when he took up the instrument at the instigation of his mother.

"She had a romantic notion of her children playing stringed instruments," he says. "I guess I objected the least of all my brothers and sisters and by the time I was eight I was pretty good."

To Bird's eternal benefit, he was encouraged to play by ear for his own enjoyment. He has never read music, relying on his natural, intuitive ability instead. "I would literally chew my food to the songs that I was learning to play. It just became a basic need from an early age, as basic as eating and sleeping. But I never really took it that seriously until 15, 16 when you're desperate for something to be good at, and then I threw myself into it."

He moved on from the standard classical repertoire to discover early jazz and gypsy folk before pop music entered his orbit late in the day. "I definitely went through a phase where I was consuming music at a rapid rate – my ears were wide open and I was hungry for it. But at a certain point when I was about 26, I was like, 'wow, I think I just ate all the music there is to eat'."

Bird first appeared on the musical radar in the early 1990s, guesting with eccentric North Carolina jazz band The Squirrel Nut Zippers. When he left to form his own group, the wonderfully esoteric Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire, another of his natural talents entered the picture: Bird is a damn good whistler, and whistling is pretty much always a feature of his records. In fact, of all the whistling violinists in pop music, he is definitely the best. The more routine business of singing and being a frontman only came along as a minimum requirement of the job.

"Really early on, when I was six or seven years old, I was singing in the back seat of my parent's car," recalls Bird. "My parents are very supportive, so it tells you how impressionable you are when you are that young because they said 'you shouldn't consider a career singing' and I clammed up for the next 14 years." Even now, Bird – who is, to set the record straight, a spellbinding singer – still prefers to describe himself as "an instrumentalist who sings words".

"The vocals are the most elusive part of making a record and it's so tied to your confidence and your psyche more than anything else," he says. "Lately the ways I make sounds – playing violin, singing, whistling – are all becoming part of the same stream. Sometimes when I'm really tired on stage, I'll get the streams crossed – I'll accidentally whistle instead of sing or play the violin. They're all just ways for a melody to escape anyway."

Bird is an earnest and eloquent interviewee. Recently, he wrote an absorbing, insightful blog for the New York Times, charting the writing sessions for a new album he will record later this year as a follow-up to the current Armchair Apocrypha. But he's not a fan of overthinking his art. "It sounds a little cheesy but my job is to daydream and not be thinking about the matter of fact things," he says.

To that end, Bird put together a little studio retreat on his family's farm in rural Illinois. "I wrote my first song out there on the front porch," he recalls. "I did have to create this space out in the country to work because when you're working in a city and there's lots of stimulus your music is going to sound a certain way. It's a place to get away from that kind of intensity."

He has also taken himself away on a couple of field trips, visiting Chicago's Field Museum and the Garfield Park Conservatory for inspiration. "I notice already there's a theme of natural history going on on this record and I had a few blank spots left in the lyrics so I went out, brought a notebook and had my eyes and ears open for good words.

"Words are tricky. I think that's why I favour ones that I don't know the meaning of. Things that are on the fringe of meaning have more meaning. I resist going to the dictionary, I like that 'what could this be?' feeling. I know some people like to have things spelled out and to understand every word but that's just not my style."

Bird will be road-testing some of this new material beside more familiar snatches of his musical hurly burly when he and his band come to Scotland as part of the Triptych festival this weekend.

"While I'm working on a record I need to keep playing live to remind myself who I am and what I sound like," he days. "If I disappeared for a year to the studio without playing live I think I would run the risk of not sounding like myself. Because when I'm on stage I have no choice but to sing the way I sing. I take a lot of risks and communication with the audience is a big part of the writing process. I really get a thrill out of doing a half-finished song in front of an audience – I even sometimes invite people to give me suggestions." Be careful what you wish for, Andrew. "Oh, I know in Scotland there's a good tradition of heckling!"

&#149 Andrew Bird plays at the Classic Grand, Glasgow on 27 April, as part of the Triptych 2008 festival.