{"id":6647,"date":"2012-06-13T01:33:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-13T08:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=6647"},"modified":"2012-06-13T01:33:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-13T08:33:00","slug":"andrew-bird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2012\/06\/andrew-bird\/","title":{"rendered":"ANDREW BIRD"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h1>\n

ANDREW BIRD<\/h1>\n
\n

Breaking out with his barn, his band, his baby and his books \u00a0 \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

After a long stretch of working mainly solo,\u00a0singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird was in a more sociable mood while making his latest album, Break It Yourself<\/em>. It\u2019s easily Bird\u2019s most collaborative effort in years. He recorded the 14 songs during two week-long stints playing with his band in a barn on his family\u2019s farm in Western Illinois. \u201cWe hung out for eight days under one roof and jammed, which we haven\u2019t done as a band before,\u201d says the Chicago area native. \u201cUsually it\u2019s me going into the studio having hashed over the songs over a couple of years and having maybe one other person in the band as a sidekick.\u201d There was very little hashing over anything this time. The group nailed most of the songs in a handful of takes, which lends the music an airy, spontaneous feel. In fact, the band learned to play the songs while recording. \u201cWe set it up like, \u2018We\u2019re not making a record, we\u2019re just learning these new songs and we\u2019re going to roll tape at the same time,\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The changes in Bird\u2019s recording process follow changes in his life outside music. Now married with a baby boy, the singer found his lyrics were becoming less oblique. \u201cI think the lack of directness in the past led to a lot of interesting writing, but something happened with me. I\u2019m a much more direct person now,\u201d says Bird, 38. \u201cI was coming out of a pretty dark time and finding \u2026 not complete<\/em> satisfaction, but the closest thing I\u2019ve ever come to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that Bird doesn\u2019t revisit some of his favorite topics on Break It Yourself<\/em>: the isolating effects of technology, for instance, as well as his fondness for history. \u201cLusitania\u201d was inspired by the British ocean liner of the same name, torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915. \u201cI like reading dry histories, because my imagination creates a novel out of it.\u201d he says. \u201cWe have all of human history to talk about, and yet pop music seems to be fixated on the last 30 or 40 years. I make an effort to break out of that cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he wasn\u2019t jamming in his barn or reading history over the past few years, Bird was writing for films. He scored the 2011 movie Norman<\/em> and contributed the song \u201cThe Whistling Caruso\u201d to the soundtrack for The Muppets<\/em>. \u201cI wrote four or five songs for them and that\u2019s the one that got in,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t know how much they wrote that scene around what I was writing, but it seemed like it was back and forth. I just read the script and thought it was funny and had a nice subversive quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Eric R. Danton<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ANDREW BIRD Breaking out with his barn, his band, his baby and his books \u00a0 \u00a0 After a long stretch of working mainly solo,\u00a0singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird was in a more sociable mood while making his latest album, Break It Yourself. It\u2019s easily Bird\u2019s most collaborative effort in years. He recorded the 14 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[3919,3920,3754,3921,10156,3923,3922],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6647"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6647"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6649,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6647\/revisions\/6649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}