Andrew Bird
I've always felt that dark lyrics with dark music is pretty useless. Maybe that's a strong statement - not useless, but for me, it's just boring.Collection: Strong
Some of your best songs come from a desperate attempt to escape, so sitting in an airport for hours I can just start pulling out little fragments of songs from my head. A lot of times a melody will just occur to me and be my companion for a couple of months.Collection: Song
Songwriters can sort of get away with murder. You can throw out crazy theories and not have to back it up with data or graphs or research.Collection: Motivation
The anti-aging advert that I would like to see is a baby covered in cream saying, 'Aah, I've used too much'Collection: Baby
I've always found that whatever you say about indie rock, it is the most inclusive genre or title for anything. It doesn't pin you down too much, like other labels would. It's just newer, it has less baggage.Collection: Rocks
The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.Collection: Song
I haven't had that many people onstage for a while, and I'm looking forward to that. They're all such creative musicians in their own right. They're all complete individuals. They're not just a pick-up band. They all have their own thing going on.Collection: People
The real drag is trying to fly from country to country, day of show, with all your gear. You get hassled all the time. It's hard trying to keep it together.Collection: Country
I'm just trying to get my body in shape so that I can handle it. It's a very physically demanding thing. I've been doing it for 16 years, so I know what I'm going into now. I'm trying to stay calm and not panic.Collection: Years
The weirdest time is when I'm having to explain myself all day to journalists, and then I don't perform, so there's no release, just a lot of self-consciousness. Then what do you do with that at the end of the day? How do you release your brain from talking about yourself all day?Collection: Talking
I really like the sound of analog things where clearly there's something being touched. You can sense that something is handmade. So much with digital, there's a disconnect.Collection: Sound
The instrumental record is a bit subtler. It's the kind of stuff on sound check, when I first pick up my violin and start to play, the kind of melodies that just pour out of me. Some of them sound very classical. Some of them sound experimental, polyrhythmic loops that I make.Collection: Play
I finished touring the last record and I started recording new .I never really left the bubble, which is I think a good thing. I was just very focused. Maybe I should have taken a break or something, and not done such a long push.Collection: Taken
Every time I make a record, it's kind of like scarification or something. You work 15 hours until you're stupid. You're just kind of all jittery.Collection: Stupid
Most records, you build from the drums and bass up. This one, we started with the vocals in Nashville and recorded them live with just the guitars and tried to make that complete and lovely-sounding without any adornment at all. I really wanted to get something with the vocal that I've never gotten before Armchair Apocrypha.Collection: Guitar
Sometimes I just think we're not meant to fly halfway around the world in a day. That some kind of mutation is going to happen.Collection: Thinking
The earth almost looks like it's packed down and dense from so many feet treading over it.Collection: Feet
The music that I write is often not necessarily full of doom and gloom. You'll notice in most of the darkest songs, the music is actually pretty peaceful and lulling.Collection: Song
Playing the violin and singing and whistling are just three different ways of making sound. It's not trying to replace a band, per se. It's become a completely different thing. And it's not just simply an effect. It's just a very surprisingly intuitive thing.Collection: Singing
When I'm onstage, I'm completely comfortable, and I feel very vital and alive.Collection: Alive
Songwriting requires some sort of ceremony to even get the process started, and it can be somewhat arbitrary.Collection: Arbitrary
Pretty much any given day, barring some major distraction, I get melodies coming to me. Lyrics don't come quite as easily. So I've been inventing little projects and challenges to sort of kick my ass with the lyrics.Collection: Challenges
It's like you don't know you're making a record unless you're half-killing yourself.Collection: Records
I still play solo shows. And some of those shows are still some of the best, most gratifying shows.Collection: Play
I definitely have to give myself permission, like on "Master Swarm," to rip a lead on that. Just play a violin solo that's - it's a bit showoff-y, but it's fun, so who cares?Collection: Fun
If you take a little time, let's say three weeks off, after recording a song, and you listen to it every other day, you're just going to know eventually.Collection: Song
It's not set in stone. I like to keep it rolling and changing, and so I am like, "Great, I get to remake my song."Collection: Song
I don't get particularly precious about things like this, though. Like the record company said, "We need a radio edit that delivers the hook" - I don't even know what they consider the hook in that song ["Oh No"] - "that delivers the hook sooner." So I'm like, "Okay. I see that." And they were all walking on eggshells, like is this going to be sacrilegious to me or something, to mess with this art I've created? And I'm like, "Great. I get to tinker with it, I get to mess with my song some more."Collection: Song
I'm coming from a place that's more experimental and indulgent already, so for the last 10 years, it's been more like, "How can I defend my own sensibilities by writing a nugget of a little catchy pop song?" That's how I'm stretching myself, by writing something really simple.Collection: Song
There's always that struggle between me wanting to keep [song] new and fresh and then be - I can never get with pop songs being so repetitive.Collection: Song
I have some irrepressible pop impulses to write an appealing, concise song. And I also have some irrepressible kind of restlessness as well, and I need to keep myself interested. When I'm left to my own devices, there's a struggle.Collection: Song
You can build up expectations for a song before you record it, and then it's like nothing's good enough in the studio.Collection: Song
People who are thinking about your music almost as much as you are, that almost never happens.Collection: Thinking About You
I've never approached classical music in a formal way, ever. I couldn't read very well. I'd have to play every piece and internalize it, almost as if I had written it myself.Collection: Play
There's always a tension between wanting to write a really concise, instant gratification type song that gets under your skin the first time you hear it, and wanting to really stretch out. I think it's a healthy tension.Collection: Song
I put a lot into my records, and I won't release anything I'm not totally thrilled with.Collection: Records
I don't like to disappear between records. I like to play shows while I'm making the record.Collection: Play
I can't relate to the process of just disappearing and writing a record, all at the same time, followed by the sort of drudgery of going out on tour and trying to recreate the record, playing the same 12 songs every night.Collection: Song
The orchestra's an amazing instrument, but I don't want to just arrange my songs for it. I think that might be kind of boring and a little bit overdramatic, perhaps. I'm still just having too much fun doing it my way, for the time being.Collection: Song
I think any songwriter or record, no matter how good it is, can become tedious if it's the same person's point of view. After four tracks, you start to get worn down no matter how good it is. It can be relentlessly good, but it's still going to wear you out.Collection: Thinking
With the words, a lot of things start with questions. Some word kind of piques my interest, and I love the way it sounds, but I really don't know what it means. And I honestly don't care for a while.Collection: Mean
Most of the songs that I appreciate are lyrically vague.Collection: Song
I don't like super-descriptive modern fiction. I like, "Here's what was happening in 1582 all over the planet." Then that gets my imagination going.Collection: Imagination
There's songs that could either be taken as a conversation between two people, like "The Privateers," or "Why," from a much earlier record. Or "Glass Figurine." That's my version of a relationship song.Collection: Song
With digital sound just becomes simply information, not the sum of its parts.Collection: Sound
The melodies come out so strong that I'm like, "Oh, crap." It's really better if they could both be kind of able to compromise, but the melodies, even more recently, they come out very fully cast and formed.Collection: Strong
Anyway, I'm digressing, but this is just kind of this 10-and-a-half-minute, ambient - you hear cicadas and birds and the wind outside and crickets as I'm swelling the piece. I could never do that on a pop record. I could, but why would I want to be agitating?Collection: Wind
I didn't have the patience for the research, or anything like that. I just like how it sets the imagination off. It's just an area that's very fertile for great words. Great metaphors, potentially.Collection: Imagination
What you see at the Field Museum is only like, 10 percent of the collection. It's birds of paradise and passenger pigeons and in all these drawers that pull out, these specimens come out and it's spectacular. And it worked out.Collection: Museums