8 hours ago
8
Andrew Bird, singer, songwriter, violin, guitar, glockenspiel, whistling
We had a family farm three hours west of Chicago, and when I was scoping out potential studio spaces I remembered some barns where my brother and I used to make forts out of hay bales when we were little. One was in rough shape and had racoons living in it, but I got a local carpenter to do the skilled jobs and I did the mundane stuff such as boards for the ceiling. Then I just moved in, but I hadn’t realised how isolating it would be. It was February and snowing and none of my friends had cars. I’d go for two weeks at a time without speaking to anyone. So I started experimenting with a loop pedal, messing around with songs.
I was playing all day and night in a kind of fever, throwing in pop, jazz, violin, guitars and polyrhythms, while wrestling with some demons. In junior high, I was not a normal thinker. I had been bullied and thought I was autistic, so I was unpacking all that in the songs. Sitting in Denny’s diner at 4am would produce some absurd humour: A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left is about a motion I adopted to shake off dark thoughts. People must have thought I was crazy, sitting there shaking my head.
Other songs on the album are about the commodification of genius as a marketing strategy, or warrior culture. With Fake Palindromes, I imagined a personal ad in a newspaper where someone puts innocuous details then slowly gets more subversive where they really want someone to perform trepanation on them.
Bringing musicians to the barn to make the album proved overwhelming: people sleeping on the floor and drinking way too much. So I decamped to Nashville – making the album Weather Systems to let off some steam – and tried to record Eggs there, but that didn’t work either. I was tearing my hair out, then jumping in my van with my gear and touring around Europe.
A music bar owner in Chicago said: “Man, you really need to go to New York or LA.” And in LA, a producer pointed me towards a young engineer, David Boucher. Finally, after a weird, fanatical five years, recording with David and the musicians in a professional environment where people worked sane hours brought sanity to the album’s multiple styles, themes, layers and details.
I was 29 and had been feeling like a has-been, but suddenly I felt like an artist, not someone just channelling my record collection. The title comes from an old magic catalogue from the 1920s that said “the mystic production of eggs”. I changed “mystic” to “mysterious”, but it just seemed to capture the thrill of creating something that didn’t previously exist.
Andrea Troolin, manager
The first time I went to the barn to visit Andrew, I drove until there were no other cars. Much later, when I read the story about Justin Vernon making the first Bon Iver album in a log cabin, I laughed and thought: “We did that, dude.” But it served Andrew’s music to start a record without the usual cacophony of life in the mix, although scrapping an album twice is very unusual.
In the barn, there were some really wild, intricate, orchestral, rocking sessions, but it didn’t sound like him. I said: “It’s like you’re wearing somebody else’s clothes.” Making Weather Systems in Nashville was partly an attempt to just get something out, because he didn’t have a record label and was dipping into his piggy bank or using his touring income to pay the band. Part of the reason for using the barn was that there was no rent.
I went up there a handful of times and also visited him in Nashville and LA to see what was going on. Playing the songs live throughout helped because he could get instant feedback on what worked and what didn’t. I took copious notes as we went through everything, trying to piece together the parts that were worth hanging on to and encourage him not to quit until he felt that it was done.
I must have 100 burned CDs of Eggs with various versions of songs and sequences of tracks before we settled on the finished version. He had come up with something that people found hard to compare, because it wasn’t another version of someone else’s thing. It felt very exciting when people loved it.
