Prolific might be an understatement when it comes to Andrew Bird's work across a myriad of mediums. In addition to his own work, the GRAMMY-nominated singer/songwriter is a renowned whistler, and was a member of Squirrel Nut Zippers for several years. Bird's 1996 debut album, Music of Hair, was followed by about 16 solo records (some with/as Bowl of Fire), not to mention a variety of collabs. And let's not forget the live albums (six), EP's (10) and film and TV projects, including acting on the FX drama "Fargo."
So it's perhaps unsurprising that Bird has managed to follow up an album — the somewhat winkingly titled My Finest Work Yet — with a record that might be even finer. Inside Problems, released June 3, offers 11 often poignant, quietly passionate songs produced by Mike Viola (who has also worked with Mandy Moore, Panic! at The Disco and Jenny Lewis). Bird will support his LP on a tour that kicks off June 15 at Los Angeles' Greek Theatre.
Via phone from his L.A. home, Bird, a low-key and thoughtful native of Lake Bluff, Illinois talks about pandemic-inspired "inside" stuff (his brain, his home) and the resultant songs that populate his latest, and maybe, greatest work.
When did you start writing the songs that would become Inside Problems — before, or during the pandemic?
Some of them started before that. There are always things that have been kind of simmering for five or six years that I just find the moment to organize. It was strange; I was wondering if just being in one place was going to affect my writing, because I always thought that traveling and performing informed my writing. Going from one place to another, just the act of leaving your home can give you perspective that kind of triggers things. And then being on stage, that sort of sense of a dialogue with an audience; I thought [that] was part of my process, too. But it turns out it wasn't that essential, and I needed the songwriting process to sort of keep my sanity and sense of purpose.
Was there a song that ended up on Inside Problems that set the tone when you realized, OK, this is where this record is going?
I think of "Underlands" as a sort of template for the album. But the one that I spent the most time on was "Faithless Ghost." And that's kind of an outlier. It started, I think, when my son — during the pandemic, we just all hung together — started being the DJ around the house. And he was playing a lot of John Cale. And Velvet Underground, but the John Cale, "Paris 1919," particularly, that song was just on every day.
I was listening to lyrics about this ghost that is sort of a coy ghost, it doesn't ever show up when you expect it to, doesn't stick to appointments. And I thought I'd take that idea and kind of expand on it. I guess it's the way you feel when you're sort of chasing down things creatively too. But that one was a very specific melody that I'm trying to just point in the general direction of this idea about this coy ghost.
May I ask how old your son is?
He's 11. He was 9 I guess at the start of the pandemic.
That's still a pretty interesting song choice for a kid to play, right?
I mean, it's kind of funny. He lives in our universe. So from an early age, I never understand when people would say 'Oh my kid listens to this horrible pop music and I can't do anything about it.' Like, why can you do anything about it? They're living in your house.
Not like we're militant about anything. He complains about going to birthday parties and having to listen to Post Malone or whatever. He's like, 'Why do they think kids like that music?' Anyway, that's a rant. But if I play one Nick Drake song, he starts playing it all the time. And I don't really listen to music that much. So he's actually influencing me. And he's actually becoming a pretty good guitarist.
There are so many beautiful references and lines in your lyrics. I was curious about "Lone Didion," — and I'm wondering if you read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking about losing her husband and then daughter?
Actually before I read it, I was talking to a friend who used to host at a restaurant where Joan Didion and her husband [John Gregory Dunne] used to come in as regulars, and they would get the same table and order the same thing. This is around 2003. Then she didn't come in for like several weeks. And she came in one more time, alone. That story struck me and then I read the book.
You explore what you call the "threshold" of who we are in the moments "in between"? A liminal space might be one term.
I just want to acknowledge that internal world that we all have, that is usually not known to anyone else. It can either drive you insane, or it could be the best companion. If you can cultivate that internal world in the right way, you never have any good reason to be bored or lonely sometimes.
I just became more acutely aware of that during the pandemic, during insomnia…and it was like, Okay, I'm here, I'm stuck here. I can't sleep for two hours. I can either spiral — as we tend to in the middle of the night — or I can try to put everyone to work, and pull out a melody and play it back in my head. While I was working on these songs, it really, really helped me get through that. Once I was done, those demons came roaring back.
I watched the Nexflix film The Bubble and enjoyed it. You were a composer on the movie; how did you get on board? Did that work affect this record?
I did that after the record was finished. I know Judd [Apatow] and he asked me to play a bunch of his Largo shows. They were doing once-a-month charity shows, and I would do those and hang out and I got the sense that he might have been kind of circling me and waiting for a project to offer up. [He did] I came in, in the final two months of the score work to work with Mike Andrews. Mike is his longtime composer and I was sort of artist-in-residence, I guess. It is a very complicated score because you have to score the movie within the movie. And I luckily didn't have to deal with…
Dinosaurs?
Yeah [laughs]. He's very exacting and has very very strong ideas about music, Judd does. So, it was a long, long process. But it was good. I came at a good time: I was finished with the record; I needed a project. But you have to generate a tremendous amount of music to satiate Judd. So it was five or six weeks, just churning out many, many cues.
I know you had a song in Orange is the New Black and other visual projects. How often do you write a song that you feel is super cinematic? Or are there times when you're watching something and you feel inspired to write?
Writing a song for a movie is the ultimate challenge for me. Doing [an] instrumental score is cool, but writing a song with lyrics specifically for movies…. I'm thinking like Harold and Maude as the ultimate project that I hope would someday come along.
It's just so challenging to try to do; to address what's happening in the movie without leading the viewer and hitting it too close. I feel like I would be well suited to that because my lyrics, they can be a bit ambiguous sometimes. When I was writing "Underlands," at first it was simply a melody. I was like, wow, this sounds like a film score scene. I was working with T-Bone Burnett at the time on [HBO crime drama] True Detective and I played it for him. He said, 'that's like the theme to a great '70s movie.'
When I first came out of music school, that's what I thought for sure wanted to do; film score work. But then I got a conversion van and a band, and hit the road and started playing rock clubs around the country. And that became the buddy road movie of my 20s.
I understand there's an unusual guitar on Inside Problems, the one that starts out "Underlands"?
My good friend Reuben Cox has the guitar shop Old Style in Silverlake. When I was working with Blake Mills on [Bird's 2006 LP] Are You Serious, he was working with Blake. First we had these electric banjos that we were all collecting. And then they're very weird, rare harmony, electric banjos. And then Reuben started putting rubber bridges on these strange old guitars. It's not that radical to mute the instrument, but it's like you commit to it.
Like permanent mute.
Yeah, it's hard to explain but what Blake was looking for… Well, guitars can chew up so much space because they resonate so much, sonically. So you take all that and then it creates these weird overtones too, if you distort it in the right way. It sounds otherworldly. I found when I started playing these guitars that it was kind of like pizzicato, but not quite.
It's funny what started with Blake and me and during that time , you hear it a lot now. You hear it kind of affecting the music that's being recorded. It was this particular Harmony guitar called the Caribbean, kind of art deco and very cool looking. It's the thing I just reached for when we were recording; it just worked. From "Underlands" to "The Night Before Your Birthday," it can go from this beautiful pizzicato to a Keith Richards rock 'n' roll thing.
The album closer, "Never Fall Apart," seems to end things on a somewhat upbeat note.
For "Never Fall Apart," my old guitarist, Jeremy Ylvisaker, sent me an EP he had done and [it] goes into the sort of Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine territory. He had this melody in there, and I thought it was so beautiful. And the song was called "Never Fall Apart," but it had no lyrics. I sat down, took the melody and over time it kind of evolved. I wrote that one fairly quickly, really inspired by that melody.
The last two songs on the album ["Stop n' Shop," "Never Fall Apart"] — from the title of my record, people are describing it as maybe not addressing all the upheaval that My Finest Work Yet was, but it really does have as many songs addressing what's happening in the world. "Stop n' Shop" is trying to understand what's missing in our lives that so many people need guns or walls or trucks to kind of fill a void in their identity. And then "Never Fall Apart" tries to answer that question.
Would you always keep those two songs connected in a live set?
I do like to keep things [together.] The sequencing of the live set is a huge part of my job. Not just what key, what tempo and the segues in between, but then the scenes and everything. It feels like half my job is sequencing. Whether people pick up on that or not, I don't know, but it's important to me.
Bobby Z. On 'Prince And The Revolution: Live' & Why The Purple One Was Deeply Human