Andrew Bird is a genius. Anyone who has spent any time with me in the past few months will confirm: I am obsessed. Since being back in Chapel Hill, and realizing how much I have really missed playing the piano easily, and for pleasure, I have started to comp along with his music and have even started to arrange one of my favorite songs for piano.
Spending so much time running his lyrics and melodies through my brain, my fingers, and lips, makes me desperately want to create something so tangible and so important. Relevant. Relevance is key.
Bird wrote for the New York Times songwriting blog recently, saying,
"I’m kind of the opposite of the confessional singer-songwriter who fills notebooks full of poetry and intones them over a bed of chords. 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. Until then I’m mostly concerned with shape, tone and texture. I’m really an instrumentalist who sings words and if you care to pay attention you might enjoy them."
Rarely can I analyze an Andrew Bird song, feel it from my head to the tips of my toes, and in my heart, and it feels superfluous. Topics of songs are often difficult to understand at first; I spend hours on song-meanings websites, filtering through what other people find and believe to be true within songs. Whenever a song seems to be about some sort of romantic endeavor, it is always melted and welded into something deeper, transposed somehow from what could be a whiny attempt at mourning something lost or rejoicing something new and lovely into a something true, fresh, and timeless, somehow. It all strikes me as unattainably perfect.
It has been said that lyrics are poems. I guess, judging from the number of songs that have been written to go along with classic poems, or new poems, or just sets of words that make sense all together and convey some semblance of emotion. In any situation. Though so many of them seem trite.
Attempting to understand or apply Andrew Bird's lyrics - especially his older stuff, on Weather Systems - is like immersing yourself in some sort of weird mirror. In The Shadow of the Wind, Daniel says that what you understand from books is a reflection of what you already know and understand. Songs like "Lull" and "Action/Adventure" are sometimes too honest for me to listen to. Sometimes they hit at the wrong time.
"being alone it can be quite romantic
like jacques cousteau underneath the atlantic
a fantastic voyage to parts unknown
going to depths where the sun’s never shone
and i fascinate myself when i’m alone
so i go a little overboard but hang on to the hull
while i’m airbrushing fantasy art on a life
that’s really kind of dull
oh, i’m in a lull"
More on this topic, I'm not quite finished.
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