With thesaurus, violin, and compulsive whistling habit
in tow, the dapper Chicago neoclassicist makes the album
of his long, unlikely career. BY JOSH MODELL

Andrew Bird likes his corner bar, the Charleston in Chicago’s Buck-town neighborhood, because there’s only one TV, and it’s more likely to be playing science documentaries—like Planet Earth’s stories of wrinkle-lipped bats and caves full of gypsum—than SportsCenter. This frozen November evening he’s entranced by a laptop screen and fully invested in whatever’s coming through his earbuds. Onstage he often wears natty suits—and wears them tall, dark, and handsomely. Here, dressed down in a fashionable hoodie and mussed hair, he looks furrowed, thoughtful, and slightly intense, which also happens to describe the music he makes.

Those might be strange qualities for a guy who got his first taste of fame as a satellite player with hot-jazz resuscitators and cultural pan-flashers Squirrel Nut Zippers. (Remember “Hell”? Okay, now go ahead and forget it again.) But it makes solid sense considering his last five years’ work, and particularly the new Noble Beast. He may have dabbled in ska-punk as a teen (band name: Charlie Nobody) and old-timey anachro-swing-jazz in his 20s (as Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire), but at around age 30, Bird, now 35, took a sharp musical turn, finding his voice anew after some serious alone time on his family’s farm in northwestern Illinois. (“It put me in a vacuum so I could totally rethink the way I make music,” he says. “If you just go somewhere where you can see the horizon every day and just recalibrate your neurological functions, it’s bound to affect the kind of music you hear.”) The result, 2003’s Weather Systems, cracked a new shell, and Bird emerged with something built from the same parts—his lovely, mournful voice, ubiquitous violin, and whistling—but that finally sounded musically debt-free.

From there, he battled—and continues to battle—his own perfectionism: 2005’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs was scrapped and restarted multiple times before Bird was satisfied, and he frequently records a song ten times in completely different ways. “It’s a grueling process,” he says with a laugh but clearly doesn’t think it’s all that funny. “Something about recording just becomes like scarification. It’s like you don’t know you’re making a record unless you’re damaging yourself.”

When he does get it right, Bird is less likely to describe his music as good (or,

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