Andrew Bird Quotes

Some of your best songs come from a desperate attempt to escape, so sitting in an airport for hours I can just start pulling out little fragments of songs from my head. A lot of times a melody will just occur to me and be my companion for a couple of months.

I'm coming from a place that's more experimental and indulgent already, so for the last 10 years, it's been more like, "How can I defend my own sensibilities by writing a nugget of a little catchy pop song?" That's how I'm stretching myself, by writing something really simple.

The weirdest time is when I'm having to explain myself all day to journalists, and then I don't perform, so there's no release, just a lot of self-consciousness. Then what do you do with that at the end of the day? How do you release your brain from talking about yourself all day?

I also don't believe that "everything happens for a reason," which is in a similar category of world-views.

I think I'm still a little too intense for my own good sometimes.

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.

In New York, I'm playing in a church, solo, doing instrumental stuff. There's talk of doing more, like, installation-type things with some of the specimen horns I've played through. Just filling a room in a museum with these horn-speaker sculptures and then making loops that run all day, and you walk around the room and sort of mix the sound by where you stand. That's all way in the future, but that kind of stuff is a different way of thinking about performing.

I create little challenges for myself, like, 'Okay, whatever you do in this song, you've got to somehow work in Greek Cypriots,' or something like that.

I'm just trying to get my body in shape so that I can handle it. It's a very physically demanding thing. I've been doing it for 16 years, so I know what I'm going into now. I'm trying to stay calm and not panic.

I finished touring the last record and I started recording new .I never really left the bubble, which is I think a good thing. I was just very focused. Maybe I should have taken a break or something, and not done such a long push.

If you take a little time, let's say three weeks off, after recording a song, and you listen to it every other day, you're just going to know eventually.

The way I work, I'm not a confessional singer-songwriter.

It's like you don't know you're making a record unless you're half-killing yourself.

You can build up expectations for a song before you record it, and then it's like nothing's good enough in the studio.

The real drag is trying to fly from country to country, day of show, with all your gear. You get hassled all the time. It's hard trying to keep it together.

I'm a terrible Scrabble player.

Anyway, I'm digressing, but this is just kind of this 10-and-a-half-minute, ambient - you hear cicadas and birds and the wind outside and crickets as I'm swelling the piece. I could never do that on a pop record. I could, but why would I want to be agitating?

There's been this perception that Europeans still hold on to, that they discover the real talented ones in American culture and give them proper credit and that's not true anymore - it used to be. A lot of jazz musicians would get respect in Europe.

I just pay attention to what's in my head. That's my number-one rule.

I've literally opened it up to suggestions and it's totally chaotic and kind of a bad idea. You don't need the actual feedback to get a sense. When you're showing a song for the first time, people can feel that newness.

There is something comforting about going into a practice room, putting your sheet music on a stand and playing Bach over and over again.

If something gets under my own skin, and keeps reoccurring, it starts to take on a certain weight and value, and I think, "I have to put this in the song. I have no choice but to mention Greek Cypriots in this song." It's a little internal challenge to myself. Like creating little imaginary rituals in yourself to help the song go from nonexisting to existing.

I think life is a wondrous thing. I'm happy to try pretty hard.

When I'm onstage, I'm completely comfortable, and I feel very vital and alive.

Well, my main instrument is violin, but I think of myself as a songwriter who happens to play violin.

Sometimes I think I don't have much choice in the matter. It's just what happens, and I'm following my instincts the whole time.

There's a lot of interesting words, nomenclatures, in science.

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.

Melodies are just honest. They can only be what they are. Words have the capacity for deception. Theyre all full of subtext, and some of them are cliche and overused and vernacular. Theyre tricky. All I can say is, words are tricky.

I can't relate to the process of just disappearing and writing a record, all at the same time, followed by the sort of drudgery of going out on tour and trying to recreate the record, playing the same 12 songs every night.

I think any songwriter or record, no matter how good it is, can become tedious if it's the same person's point of view. After four tracks, you start to get worn down no matter how good it is. It can be relentlessly good, but it's still going to wear you out.

Pretty much any given day, barring some major distraction, I get melodies coming to me. Lyrics don't come quite as easily. So I've been inventing little projects and challenges to sort of kick my ass with the lyrics.

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.

I have the barn, it's just kind of like a studio. Almost all artists have la studio to work in, and that's really what it is. A place to get away. I'll spend maybe four days out there if I can, just completely immersed - like where I don't bathe or brush my teeth for a few days, just get up and make coffee and experiment until the sun goes down.

The music that I write is often not necessarily full of doom and gloom. You'll notice in most of the darkest songs, the music is actually pretty peaceful and lulling.

Norman is a very up-close, personal, character drama and I'd like to do something more zoomed out, a little more pastoral, some sweeping epic. I'd like to try something different.

I write a lot more when I'm happy, because you're hopeful, you're motivated.

The orchestra's an amazing instrument, but I don't want to just arrange my songs for it. I think that might be kind of boring and a little bit overdramatic, perhaps. I'm still just having too much fun doing it my way, for the time being.

This might be a controversial thing to suggest, but in a quest to understand and relate to terrorism or school shootings, sometimes it feels like it's real, the appeal. As we've seen with ISIS, it's not always the devout who are getting into it; it's just people looking for a sense of belonging. The more they feel they're up against, the more intensity the cause has. It's an epic clash of cultures, and both sides are playing that up, but it's human beings disaffected, detached, and lonely.

All the folks I play with come from jazz backgrounds or at least appreciate spontaneity within the parameters of a pop song.

I put a lot into my records, and I won't release anything I'm not totally thrilled with.

With digital sound just becomes simply information, not the sum of its parts.

Songwriters can sort of get away with murder. You can throw out crazy theories and not have to back it up with data or graphs or research.

What you see with your eyes when you're making music is going to have a profound effect on what you hear.

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.

I've always had levity in my songs, so I like to turn things over, twist them around, and make fun of myself.

The melodies come out so strong that I'm like, "Oh, crap." It's really better if they could both be kind of able to compromise, but the melodies, even more recently, they come out very fully cast and formed.

I think when I was pretty young I got really into the tone of my instrument and I remember just playing one note for an hour to just kind of feel the resonance of the violin.