In a March 2008 post titled “Words Will Tell” on the New York Times‘s Measure for Measure songwriting blog, Andrew Bird delved into his own process, specifically his inspiration for the song “Oh No,” which opens his new album, Noble Beast (Fat Possum). On a flight from New York to Chicago, he explained, he’d been seated behind a terrified three-year-old who screamed, “Oh no!” over and over again. Struck by the mournfulness of the little boy’s wail, he finally found it more moving than annoying. “So when I got home,” Bird wrote on the blog, “I picked up my guitar and tried to capture the slowly descending arc of that kid’s cry. It fit nicely over a violin loop that I had been toying with which moves from C-major to A-major.”
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That anecdote pretty much sums up one of Bird’s chief weaknesses: he seems to handle the emotional content of his songs with the detachment of a lab technician. He comes close to acknowledging this in the same post: “Meaning or ‘the truth that’s in my heart’ usually reveals itself well after the record is released. I’m often surprised that the things I care about actually end up in my songs…. I’m really an instrumentalist who sings words and if you care to pay attention you might enjoy them.”
Noble Beast is filled with juxtapositions of the traditional and the freewheeling. Melodramatic cabaret violin carries the lead on the dark pop number “Nomenclature,” but then late in the song it’s suddenly overwhelmed by a wall of overdriven guitar. “Not a Robot, but a Ghost” reveals the influence of Minneapolis electronic musician Martin Dosh, an unlikely favorite collaborator of Bird’s—a frequent member of Bird’s touring band, he appears on 2007’s Armchair Apocrypha and is credited with “percussion, looping, keys” on Noble Beast. Here Bird departs even more dramatically from his usual old-timey posture and ends up as far away from his comfort zone as he’s ever seemed. “Not a Robot” is built on a beat that alternates between a flickering, IDM-inflected loop and a hip-hop thump pieced together from a pitch-dropped kick drum and hand claps; its driving rhythm and coating of distortion give it an aggressive feel that’s almost entirely absent from the rest of his catalog. It sounds a little like something from Radiohead’s In Rainbows, though that might just be coincidence—when I interviewed him for another publication in 2005, Bird insisted that the only music he listens to is the stuff he makes and the stuff he overhears coming out of cars, stores, and neighbors’ apartments.
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