God forbid, finished), but rather in more colorful terms: He calls 2007’s surprise indie-world hit Armchair Apocrypha “pointy and toothy,” whereas Noble Beast is “liquid and flowing.” Sounds that disagree with him do so physically. “When I was a kid, the sound of a pedal-steel guitar on a family vacation in the Smoky Mountains would make me want to throw up,” he says. “But hearing a child behind me on the airplane, wailing—not only is it beautiful, I’m also a bit envious that he can let his emotions fly like that.”

It’s been a steady build for Bird since he hit the reset button, and his success can be marked by his trajectory through Chicago venues: Just a couple of years ago, he was a star of the tiny Hideout club. Soon he was headlining the 1,000-capacity Metro, then, just as quickly, the twice-as-big Riviera. Armchair snuck up on everybody, selling 100,000 copies in the U.S.—far more than he had ever shifted before, likely because Bird is a road warrior, doing 200 shows a year, and because he appeals seamlessly to both the sweater-clad public-radio crowd and the indie kids. A packed, joyfully raucous homecoming show last September at the gorgeous Millennium Park band shell in front of 15,000 was undoubtedly a watershed moment, and up next is a Noble Beast tour that kicks off with a sold-out show at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

“When all those kids rushed the stage toward the end [at Millennium Park], I was truly moved,” he says. “I know people appreciate us, but usually it’s not reciprocated in such a physical way. Doing festivals, you see bands that know if they do a big swell at the end of a song, people will go apeshit. We almost do everything to avoid that kind of orgasm. If anything, almost every one of our songs doesn’t do the money shot at the end; it does the opposite.”

In a way, Bird’s success mirrors that of Wilco, hometown friends who lent him their studio for a good chunk of Noble Beast’s recording. Both have enjoyed a slow growth, and both have followed artistic paths that didn’t seem linear or obvious. If you’re doing the math, Noble Beast could be Bird’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—quiet, exquisite, and richly rewarding for those willing to examine it closely. It might very well find the same pack of fans, too: When Bird guested during Wilco’s five-night career-spanning Chicago stand early last year, he was greeted almost as rapturously as Sir Jeff Tweedy himself. Bird even borrowed Wilco’s drummer, Glenn Kotche, for Noble Beast’s limited-edition bonus instrumental disc, Useless Creatures. (“I haven’t heard it yet,” says Kotche, “but it definitely could’ve gone in many different directions.”)

And if there’s one thing to credit for Bird’s surge in popularity at home and abroad, it may be his remarkable whistling skills. His training came on the violin—starting at age four, straight through the Conservatory at Northwestern, a working musician since graduating—but it’s his pursed lips that command the most attention. His whistle, which can sound like an impossibly beautiful

“If I’m not talking or sleeping—even
when I’m eating sometimes—I’m
whistling. It can drive people nuts.
It can drive me nuts.”

songbird one minute and a spooky Theremin the next, gives as much to Noble Beast as Bird’s cherished new 1947 Martin guitar (“We went through hundreds to find the right one”), his stronger-than-ever voice, his alternately plucked and bowed violin, and drummer Martin Dosh’s inventive percussion loops. The whistle is simultaneously fragile and powerful, but it took Bird some time to convince himself that it’s not just an overly simple melody-delivery system.

“If I’m not talking or sleeping— even when I’m eating sometimes—I’m whistling,” he says. “It can drive other people nuts; it can drive me nuts. I didn’t think to use it in my songwriting [at first] because it was just too

easy. I’m used to shit being hard. Violin is hard. I was afraid it would be kind of whimsical. To my surprise, it’s one of the most honest and powerful instruments I have. It cuts through everything.”

That obsession with pure sound extends, strangely and sometimes amazingly, to lyrics. Bird carefully crafts sentient sentences built from unusual words—often scientific or historical—that he stumbles across. And he fixates just as much on the sound of those words as he does their meaning. For example, mellifluous-sounding “radiolarians” pop up in Noble Beast’s “Masterswarm”—it turns out they’re single-celled organisms that he fashioned a narrative around. Other songs are populated by proto-Sanskrit Minoans and Greek Cypriots, anomalous appendages and dermestids.

“The more vague or archaic the word, the more it has value to me,” he says. “That’s when the best lines come out, when you’ve kind of left sense behind.” And while that may sound detached or clinical or even proggy, Bird finds a squishy beating heart at the center of each self-constructed miniverse, and often that heart is desperately detached and lonely.

During Beast’s sessions, Bird blogged for The New York Times, “I listened to my record recently and I’m concerned about how much I like it,” but he admits now he wrote that during “the upward swing of a very tumultuous, par-for-the-course kind of manic-depressive state.” Onstage, though, he finally looks giddy and contented: Whether he’s alone with his violin and sampler pedals or backed—as has been the case lately—by a full band, it’s clear that he was meant to play live.

“I pinch myself before every performance and say, ‘Don’t phone it in. Make something real happen,’ Bird admits. “It’s this communal thing, and that’s so rare these days. It’s a sacred thing.”

That resolve is one of just a few things Bird has clung to as his music has evolved into a masterful blend of the classic-sounding and forward-thinking. But he still doesn’t know what to say when the farmer next door asks what he’s crafting in the barn.

“I haven’t quite mastered that,” he says. “I just know that when you cross into Canada, you tell them that you play old-timey music, and chances are you won’t get searched. Just say ‘old-timey,’ and they won’t search you for drugs.”

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