Ahead of the release of his 2022 record 'Inside Problems,' singer-songwriter Andrew Bird joins The Current to talk about his inspiration for the album, scoring the new Judd Apatow film 'The Bubble,' and grappling with writing music in solitude. Plus, Bird shares performances of two tracks from the upcoming record. Watch the conversation and performances above, and find a full transcription below.

Interview

Edited for clarity and length.

JADE: How are you doing today? How is life?

ANDREW BIRD: Life's okay, you know, good.

It's a tough question. It sounds like you're you're grappling with some of these questions as well, because you just announced a new album. We'll be listening to some of the live takes from that coming up here. But it's called 'Inside Problems,' and I'm guessing that is for multiple levels, just from conversations with friends and living in the world, we're dealing with "stuck inside" problems, and internal problems, and the state of the world, some very outside problems that people are internalizing. So I'm kind of curious, what are your inside problems?

What are my inside problems? Well, I don't know if you want to get too into that, but--

I mean, we can we can do this like it's a session, a psychology--

A therapy session?

Yeah, let's do it.

Sometimes that gets scary when all your interviews turn into therapy sessions. But yeah, the title is something I've had--I keep a running list of possible titles. Usually there are things that I think are funny that speak volumes with only a few words. And it turns out that the subject matter of all these songs kind of gets summed up pretty well by 'Inside Problems,' but it wasn't, as some might suspect, about being stuck inside. Maybe metaphorically or something, but not not literally stuck inside. It came before that.

Did the title come before that? Or did the songs actually come before?

The title came before, but the songs were written almost--most of them during the pandemic. A few got started before.

I was reading this article about the last couple of years and how people are starting to have like memory loss. Because of the weirdness, like this almost liminal space that we were creating, where nobody knew when it would end, nobody really knew where it began, so you couldn't put your memories on specific days.

I think it's also a lack of perspective because if you're not traveling much you lose a sense of where you were, and where you've been. And that gives you--I've actually deal with that in one of the songs called "Fixed Positions" where it's not just that issue but it's like as you get older your patterns get more, you get more set in your ways in your patterns and it's like slow drying cement, you know, like neural pathways and know how to resist that. This is like a two year exercise and how to resist that shrinking universe.

Have you discovered how?

Well, I guess it's like, how do you--that's kind of what it's dealing with, your internal world has to be really active and just lying awake in the middle of the night and turning that insomnia into something amusing instead of scary. To be entertained by your inner internal world, I guess.

I've been saying a lot recently, or to myself, at least, because I've been having a lot of conversations with myself the last two years. But about that idea of "if you don't enjoy yourself," I think the last couple of years are tough. And especially if you're an extrovert, or like you were, you're typically on the road, you're touring, you're making these cemented memories. So, did you get a better sense of who you are? How did you spend that internal time? Were you alone during the pandemic? Or did you have people around?

My family, my wife and my son, but I can't imagine a lot of my friends who are living alone in an urban apartments, I was like, how are you doing this? I've had earlier bouts with with solitude living on a farm and years ago. And that was extreme, extreme solitude, not speaking to people for like two weeks. So that was my Crash Course in how to deal with your own personal demons that can't be drowned out, you know?

What are what are some of your coping mechanisms? I feel like some people need to learn from others, maybe myself included, what were some of your coping mechanisms in those long bouts?

I don't know that I did cope. But I mean, I was working on something--I was trying to have a breakthrough, I guess, creatively at the time, so I was just working from morning till night, you know, hardly taking a break. So I had a mission, I didn't know what I was looking for, but back then I think I found it. Now I can kind of take that solitude, since I went through that kind of painful period, I can kind of--it's portable now. I can take it elsewhere.

There's an idea about this personal scattering in your song "Atomized," and things falling apart, and trying to kind of figure all of that out. That idea of like being unpinned in time, I've been talking about this with some other musicians who, I mean, you're an established artist, you have your career and I feel like you kind of can make make of it what you will. I've had friends who are kind of at more at the beginning of their career and feel like they've lost so much momentum, lost so much time. And that idea of how do you fill that? Do you just start back at the beginning? Because you did, you released 'My Finest Work,' in 2019. And then, you know, the pandemic hits. So were you able to do what you wanted to with that album, or did it feel like you lost the momentum?

It didn't feel like it was cut short too much. There was one tour that I had to cut short because of doing Fargo, and then then the pandemic hit, but no, I was able to do the whole world tour for that. I get though, I wonder, more the lack of the smaller clubs scene and the audience, because I for a long time needed the dialogue with the audience to write. Whether or not we're actually discussing on stage, how to finish writing a song or not. It's more just the feeling of people really listening in a room to you. I need to play shows to remind myself who I am. If I'm in the studio all the time I forget very quickly who I am and what I'm doing. Imagine you're constantly listening to your outgoing message on your voicemail or something, you know what I mean? Or, I guess, with social media, it's like, people are listening to their voices or seeing themselves all the time. But that kind of self awareness is not always great for the songwriting process. So I wonder, yeah, is it that live, small club experience that needs to be revitalized after all this?

Yeah. Well, with that in mind, you know, I've seen you perform in a small church, I've seen you perform in a outdoor baseball field. For this new album, 'Inside Problems,' where do you--in your dream world and your mind what would be like the ideal way for you to bring this out to people? Where would you want to tour it?

I think we've got kind of the ideal venues coming up this summer that I've always wanted to headline like Red Rocks and the Greek Theatres and this album has a lot of space in it. So playing outside, but in a natural sort of amphitheater is ideal, I think. But there's a lot of room for the vocals in there. There's a lot of overhead in the way it's recorded. So I think it needs to be a big, larger space really.

Yeah, this is where I should note that you are playing in the Twin Cities, you're going to be with Iron and Wine on August 13 at Surly Brewing Festival Field. So that will give you the space and the outdoors. Something I always appreciate about you when you're on tour is the interesting instrumentation. And you know, whether it's building up sounds by looping or, you know, you have those big gramophones or whatever they were that were kind of doing the womping noise. When you're going in and kind of thinking about how you want to tour an album, are you somebody who is like, excited about the the creative process of maybe building something or having that exposed on tour in real time?

Yeah, I mean, I've often thought of the stage as like the 35 millimeter frame. And whatever I fill it with, I want it to mostly be functional, but interesting to look at so thus these these horns--spinny horns, which I'll probably still bring with me, because it's an actual effect that I enjoy. Yeah, it's visually cool, but it's actually throwing the sound off and like a tornado siren kind of way. But yeah, I've always enjoyed collaborating with visual people to help kind of create the whole picture. I thought of my first couple albums in terms of like, as like a film director, almost like there's different characters in the songs and there's throughlines of stories, and how do you then turn that into like a visual? What's the visual thing that helps complete the picture? It's not like underlining everything that you're talking about. It's another chapter to the story. And I really love you know, it keeps me sane to work with visual artists, and not always be buried in the music.

You actually recently scored a film, 'The Bubble,' Judd Apatow's new film, how did this happen? How did you team up with them?

I play a lot at this club in in LA called Largo, which puts together a lot of variety show format, with comedians and musicians. So I'll do like four songs, and Judd was doing his charity nights. And he asked me to do them, and it would be like, Nick Kroll or Pete Holmes, or all these smart, hilarious people and he'd been kind of circling me a little bit, but it takes a lot for people in Hollywood to take a risk on an "artist", I use quotation marks because I think artists have a reputation for being a pain in the ass as opposed to like a career film composer. Even though, I guess that when you use to the autonomy of writing your own albums and playing your own shows, Hollywood's a different beast. You're part of the machine, and you have to kind of toe the line. So anyway, I got brought on as kind of an artist in residence on the score. So I wasn't totally responsible for, you know, it's an army. It's a such a huge budget thing, you're on Warner Brothers soundstage with, like, 15 people in the control room alone, just doing the orchestra mix. And then during COVID, there were like shifts of different orchestra sections coming in day after day.

Because you could only have a certain number of people in the room at the same time or something?

Yeah, so it really both made it take longer and cost more but thankfully, I wasn't responsible for the budget in any way. And I just kind of came in for the last, you know, two months of doing the score to kind of give it my whatever.

The Andrew Bird sparkle?

Yeah.

Well that's exciting. There were a lot of projects that kind of popped up where you were able to collaborate. I know there was also 'These 13,' which you did with Jimbo. I think I read something where you said it's something you always wanted to do? Did you feel like without touring, you were kind of able to indulge some of these other projects, these passions that you had?

Yeah, I mean, it's the kind of album you put out where you where there's a campaign and a world tour and everything, the song album is every, like, three years or so. But in between, I mean, it's honestly, it's not--people think you're prolific, but to put out 12 songs, 13 songs every three years, it's really not that demanding. If you're working, if you're thinking about and working on music day after day, you know, you're capable of doing a lot more than that. So I tried to come up with these projects in between that I think will kind of keep the process of writing a song record takes so much restraint that I like to invent these projects to give me room to mess around. And this Jimbo album was just something for 20 years I wanted to do, because he has such an interesting musicality. And I wanted to showcase that.

So I'm curious about this restraint when you talk about creating a "song album," because there are certain musicians who are like, I'm inspired by the Spirit, it comes inside of me, and that's how I create. And then there are, you know, musicians where like, this is my job, I go to work every day, and I write every day because this is my job. That's how I view it. So I'm kind of curious about how you break that down. Since you say there are kind of some different ways that you break these projects apart.

Well, the song albums are--it doesn't feel like a job ever. It feels like you're trying to make sense of this mess of all these things that are swirling around in your head over a period of time. So you're just kind of reaching out and grabbing something that keeps coming back and keeps haunting you. And you say, "I'm going to do something with that." And so it's a bit of like, yeah, you're trying to organize your mind, your sort of subconscious into song form. But I don't really--it's like, I do whatever I want. And then after we record it, I say to the engineer, "How long is that?" Because I'm like, hoping it comes under four minutes, "Underlands" is five and a half, six minutes long. But if it comes in under four minutes, I'm very excited. Brevity is a virtue, but there's all sorts of things I want to get in there, you know, but you don't want to just put stuff in there because you can or because you're inspired to but it's tough being your own editor and it's kind of challenging.

That's why we need to get you back on the road in those small rooms--

Small clubs, yeah.

Where you can work it out with the audience. There was in that in that song "Underlands," when I was listening to that I had an almost--speaking of like, the visual element, the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when they're in the the tunnel, and everything is very psychedelic. I was mentally in that place. So can you tell us just a little bit about "Underlands" and where you were while you were trying to put that together?

Yeah, I wrote this melody on the guitar, which is not my main instrument. And so I don't really know what I'm doing. But it kind of popped out and sounded like a really solid, classic film score melody. And then I was reading this book called 'Underlands,' I think it's James McFarland. He's like a explorer alpinist or something that decided instead of climbing mountains he was going to explore underground worlds. And so it's a nonfiction book that kind of Chronicles these different mines and underground catacombs and everything. And so I had that going on in my head and I was thinking about, you know, just surface tension. Surface, whether it's water or land or not knowing what's just under the surface--how those things, you know, what that conjures in the early history of civilization. People trying to make sense of things and what they, you know, Hades and the underworld and all this sort of--yeah, it's like trying to organize all these tangential thoughts into something that makes some sense.

That's so beautiful to hear. And I think honestly, the idea of looking back on this time in the future is something that as somebody who curates music, sort of as a daily thing for people, the idea of what this sound in this time is going to be--it fascinates me. And I almost can't wait. It's like, I've never been this disassociated from myself, just picturing what it's going to look like from the outside looking back on it. And it is this time period where we're going to be looking to musicians and artists and their reflections, especially if we can't remember anything for ourselves. I find that to be fascinating. So I'm very grateful to you and other artists for documenting and actually spending the time to figure out what's going on in your head and put it to order.

Yeah, my pleasure.

External Link

Andrew Bird - official site

Credits

Host - Jade
Guest - Andrew Bird
Producers - Derrick Stevens, Jesse Wiza
Technical Director - Eric Romani