Andrew Bird Quotes

The problem is, when you're working with orchestras, you only get the orchestra for about two hours before the performance to pull it all together, and that doesn't sound like a real collaboration.

The fact that I wasn't expected to read music at all and was absorbing everything by ear ... it had a huge affect on the kind of musician that I became.

There's a lot of interesting words, nomenclatures, in science.

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.

The earth almost looks like it's packed down and dense from so many feet treading over it.

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.

Playing the violin and singing and whistling are just three different ways of making sound.

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.

I've always been fascinated and stared at maps for hours as a kid. I've especially been most intrigued by the uninhabited or lonelier places on the planet. Like Greenland, for instance, or just recently flying over Alaska and a chain of icy, mountainous islands, uninhabited.

I think when I was pretty young I got really into the tone of my instrument and I remember just playing one note for an hour to just kind of feel the resonance of the violin.

Guitars are kind of just, you know, sexy, especially old vintage ones.

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.

I guess I'm attracted to more archaic words because they can be imbued with more meaning, because their definition is elusive.

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.

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.

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.

I just pay attention to what's in my head. That's my number-one rule.

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.

I mean, you still can't jump offstage and go read a book. But I'm getting better at it. It is something you can manage. You can still give everything you have to the audience onstage, and have something for yourself.

Sometimes I think I don't have much choice in the matter. It's just what happens, and I'm following my instincts the whole time.

I still play solo shows. And some of those shows are still some of the best, most gratifying shows.

My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.

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.

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.

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. I'm happy to be in that category.

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.

The first notes I still play when I start a sound check are classical. Those are my roots.

I'm into lately being a little less precious about writing and being like, "Okay, what if I just locked myself in my room, pretend that there's someone outside with a gun that's saying, 'Don't come out until you write something.'"

I am, in some sense, a writer. Even though I kinda downplay the word thing, I do enjoy writing sometimes.

I have the barn, it's just kind of like a studio. Almost all artists have la studio to work in, and that's really what it is. A place to get away. I'll spend maybe four days out there if I can, just completely immersed - like where I don't bathe or brush my teeth for a few days, just get up and make coffee and experiment until the sun goes down.

Every time I get up in the morning, melodies occur to me and I start trying to shape lyrics to melodies.

I think life is a wondrous thing. I'm happy to try pretty hard.

Some of my earlier songs are kind of more about mental illness.

My head is full of shifting patterns and polyrhythmic stuff; but I want to use all acoustic instruments and create this kind of tapestry of interlocking lulling parts.

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?

Since I first picked up the violin, I've been very interested in tone and texture: I would have very visceral reactions to the texture of a snare drum or a pedal steel guitar or a violin.

The way I work, I'm not a confessional singer-songwriter.

You can build up expectations for a song before you record it, and then it's like nothing's good enough in the studio.

A day off after a show with no agenda in a foreign city is about the most fertile creative situation I can imagine. Just walking with nothing to do, killing time and hearing the sights and sounds of an unfamiliar place.

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?

Well, my main instrument is violin, but I think of myself as a songwriter who happens to play violin.

I create little challenges for myself, like, 'Okay, whatever you do in this song, you've got to somehow work in Greek Cypriots,' or something like that.

No, it's not dissatisfaction that inspires me to tinker with my songs, it's just restlessness.

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.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

I've literally opened it up to suggestions and it's totally chaotic and kind of a bad idea. You don't need the actual feedback to get a sense. When you're showing a song for the first time, people can feel that newness.

Correlation across replicated environments adds a whole new dimension of complexity of the environment, ... You would expect most application groups to have the same set of policies. In reality, you have differences in policies. That reflects back to that whole process of manual storing in the environment.

What you see with your eyes when you're making music is going to have a profound effect on what you hear.

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.

What's cool about indie rock is that one band can do effectively the same thing as another band, and one band nails it, and the other one doesn't. I like that elusiveness.

When I'm onstage, I'm completely comfortable, and I feel very vital and alive.

I think jazz was just seeking respect and validity because a lot of people didn't believe it was a viable art form, and then they got a lot of attention in Europe. A lot of bands that can't catch flies in the US have these followings in Europe, [but] it's less and less the case. American audiences are way more sophisticated and adventurous than anyone thinks that they are.

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.

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."

If something gets under my own skin, and keeps reoccurring, it starts to take on a certain weight and value, and I think, "I have to put this in the song. I have no choice but to mention Greek Cypriots in this song." It's a little internal challenge to myself. Like creating little imaginary rituals in yourself to help the song go from nonexisting to existing.

Sometimes the word dictated the melody.

A good espresso to me is a little bit salty; you just become used to a good taste. Anytime I go into a new place and they don't clean their machine properly or the water temperature isn't right, it tastes awful.

Just don't let the human factor fail to be a factor at all

I don't want technology to take me so far that I don't have to use my brain anymore. It's like GPS taking over and losing your internal compass. It's always got to be tactile, still organic.

I still kind of believe this absurd line that if you have to write it down, it's not worth remembering.

We were all basically alone, and despite what all his studies had shown what was mistaken for closeness was just a case of mitosis.

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.

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.

Usually bands with violins - it's this little, poorly amplified looking kind of futile on stage, and that's not the way that my music is put together.

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.

Most of the songs that I appreciate are lyrically vague.

I write a lot more when I'm happy, because you're hopeful, you're motivated.

Honestly, I didn't have the patience for biology or history in an academic sense, but I always liked the kind of big questions.

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.

I've done my share of busking, and it's fun until it isn't. There are musicians in the subways that will make you cry, they're so good.

I think I'm still a little too intense for my own good sometimes.

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.

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?

Songwriting requires some sort of ceremony to even get the process started, and it can be somewhat arbitrary.

I put a lot into my records, and I won't release anything I'm not totally thrilled with.

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.