There’s nothing better than a nice, honest-to-goodness surprise – something you really didn’t expect popping up right there before you, out of the blue, making you feel so much better for it. So it was with Andrew Bird’s EP, Weather Systems, and so it was tonight in the apparently-refurbished-yet-still-somehow-comfortably-dingy King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow, where Andrew is playing as support for the rather more well-known Clem Snide.
He hops onto the stage, and to a practically empty room, begins to whistle an opening melody to ‘First Song’. Soon, he’s kicking his boots off, the violin is taken up, and he’s playing the beginning pizzicato of ‘Action-Adventure’. A pedal is pressed, and the melody we just heard rings out in a loop, over which he plays a sweeping riff. This is itself looped, and played over again, until it starts to look slightly incongruous, one man on a stage so filled with music… Throwing enigmatic hand gestures as he sings, he seems completely lost in the sounds he just created, sounds that now surround him and us. You’re entranced by the process as much as the music being built right before your ears. Somewhere within the space of his first few songs, an uncommon thing is happening – the usual gabbling at the bar is absent, and more and more people are venturing into the room to see what’s going on, who’s doing all that whistling, and where’s that string quartet coming from?
And he pulls it off, every time. The crowd's applause and whooping at the end of his set was proof enough of that, and it was then I was able to accost him from his merchandise stall for a brief chat about his current life as a one-man band, before rushing off to make another appearance downstairs with Clem Snide onstage at the end of their set.
Onstage you were saying it was a bigger crowd tonight than usual. It was a rare response to a support act for King Tut’s as well; you normally get a lot of people yabbering in the bar, and so on. Everyone was very into you.
That’s good. Maybe I’m just lucking out since I went solo, but there’s been a kind of weird phenomenon where in just 1 show in 100 I’ve had to fight the audience. Even if it’s in a sports bar, or even if it’s outside, people will shut up.
I think it’s the unique way you perform. You seem as enraptured by the songs as the audience.
It’s the only time during the day I have any relief. Onstage, I am the most relaxed and alive. It’s weird. The whole day, you might as well be in a hospital bed with IVs dripping to you, because you’re in stasis. Everything you consume, everything you do is about keeping your shit together for the show. Right to the moment I go onstage, I think, “I feel like total hell!” and “I can’t, there’s no way!”
I just get really anxious before a show. It’s weird. It’s like these superstitious nerves. Like, if I don’t do this and this; if I don’t have an equal measure of caffeine; gotta have the right drugs; gotta have the right… It’s pretty much living for that. What else is there to live for when you’re stuck in a band?
You said the audiences seem to react to you differently solo?
No, it’s just more… It’s a totally different experience. The band – five-piece band, I still play with them – an amazing drummer, and we really have this onstage energy together. Last time I was in Glasgow I was with Nora O’Connor [The New Pornographers, Bowl of Fire], and we played at The Arches about two years ago. We would sing harmonies and stuff, but now I’m alone, I have total control of all the sounds being played, and I’m creating basslines. I’m creating the rhythmic element, and that tends to be elastic.
It’s different. I can get more deeply into it. I feel more self-conscious in front of a band I have to deal with day-to-day than I do in front of a bunch of people.
That control you have – do you find that’s more restrictive, in that if you’re making a loop to play over, you’re then confined by that loop in what you play?
No. Once I get to that first loop, and get it in time, I don’t really have to worry about it. From that point, it’s very intuitive. It’s like this blob of sound that I can just use in my ear, and every night I can change what I’m doing. I can be like, “I’m gonna sing it this way”. It’s kind of like a blob – I visualise it in front of me – “A little blob. I can shave a bit off here. I can put a bit more E in that – and that’s…”
Because there are no drums, I have to create my own tension in the music. That’s a different feeling to playing in a band. Playing in a band is more physical, and this way, the bow is sliding into the string to the point where it’s almost screaming, and just trying to create the push and pull.
I think that’s what fascinates the audience - you do it seemingly effortlessly. Why’d you take your shoes off, though?
I have to work a very tiny dial to fade it out. These are pretty bulky boots! I usually take them off before the show, or sometimes I even bring bedroom slippers. But yeah, I never intended to be doing this right now. I didn’t expect to enjoy it so much. It seems to be getting a different kind of response – a different audience to the shows.
So the trick is now I’ve tasted this total control, how am I gonna work it back into a band situation? Because I guess the main thing I miss is the drums. That’s the one thing I really can’t do. I do miss being able to break a sweat, not that I never do, and rock out.
The version you played of ‘Lull’ from Weather Systems was very different. You seem to change the tension in the song a lot.
Yeah. It’s kind of a ride. I’m barely trying to keep the phrasing within the confines of the song. The other thing about the solo show, and it’s something I’ve always talked about and admired in other bands, like The Handsome Family - every night they create a situation with the audience that seems unique, mostly through banter. For me, it’s not so much the banter, though it can be, but it’s watching me almost fuck up some part of it.
If I’m playing a full set, I like to put in one thing I’ve heard or thought of that day into the set. If I’m working on a song, and I’m half-done, I’ll sort of involve the audience. I like to do that - or word games I’ve been playing in my head. I’ve got it down to a Choose Your Own Adventure… You know that?
Turn to page 45, turn to page 88… Yeah, I was obsessed with them as a child.
I wanna get more into that. Those last two nights, playing kinda thin shows [Manchester, and previously, Wolverhampton], you’re under a lot of personal pressure to not hang your head low, and those are the nights that you really challenge yourself.
So, I feel bad for places like London or New York. They get all the shitty shows. Places like Wolverhampton get some of the best shows. There are so many other distractions in a ‘big’ show.
Finally, can you tell me about your collaboration with Kristin Hersh last year on The Grotto?
That was the first thing I did in my barn, recording. That was a long time ago – almost 2 ½ years ago. With modern technology, I’d just got ProTools, and she sent me a ProTools file, so I popped it into my computer. It took me 4 hours. Half a day.
You’re spoiling the romantic image I have of you all round a campfire, you, Howe Gelb and Kristin…
I think Howe might have been there in the flesh, but we were never in the same room.
A friend of mine describes the part you play in Deep Wilson as the saddest violin she’s ever heard.
[We whistle it together]
Thanks. We did a tour, the three of us. I wouldn’t be able to whistle that for you if I hadn’t been playing it! But, um, that was an interesting tour.
How did it come about?
All that stuff was instigated by Kristin and Billy [O'Connell, Kristin's manager and husband]. We’d played a show in Chicago years ago, and that’s where the idea was born. It was not a collaboration that I think music fans of either one of us would expect, so that kind of made it cool.
…
And with that, we vault downstairs again so Andrew can join Clem Snide in their finale.
Weather Systems was released on Monday 9th February in Europe and is available at http://www.bowloffire.com. He’ll also have a new CD out (already completed, as he announced onstage), fresh from the barn, in the autumn.
Dermot Fitzsimons
Photo: Morna Macleod
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