About Andrew Bird: Andrew Wegman Bird is an American musician, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist.
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.
I spend a lot of time working by myself developing songs, but I really need some other counterpart to help me pull it all together, because you go nuts working if I had to finish an entire project all within my own head.
You travel with the hope that something unexpected will happen. It has to do with enjoying being lost and figuring it out and the satisfaction. I always get a little disappointed when I know too well where I'm going, or when I've lived in a place so ...
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.
My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.
Honestly, I didn't have the patience for biology or history in an academic sense, but I always liked the kind of big questions.
Maybe it's just, I've always been to the less traveled places, in any topic, whether it's history, I always like to just choose the most obscure topic. And I don't know why I have that impulse. I can't really explain it but I've been doing that since...
I think I'm still a little too intense for my own good sometimes.
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.
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.
My mom had this romantic notion of her children playing classical music. The idea is you learn it when you're still learning language. It's using the same part of the brain.
I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.
There's a lot of interesting words, nomenclatures, in science.
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.
Music as a social conduit has always been important to me.
What you see with your eyes when you're making music is going to have a profound effect on what you hear.
There is something comforting about going into a practice room, putting your sheet music on a stand and playing Bach over and over again.
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.
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.
Every time I get up in the morning, melodies occur to me and I start trying to shape lyrics to melodies.
