Our April Artist of the Month is Andrew Bird, and the fascinating thing about him — besides the fact that he’s both indie music star and violin / whistle prodigy close to the level of Chris Thile — is if you really dig into his 20+ year career (his first album was released in 1992!) he often incorporates and records Irish / Scottish fiddle reels, traditional country (“Richmond Woman” “If I Needed You”), and string arrangements that would be just as fitting on a Punch Brothers record as they would be among his adventurous electronic looping, poppy hooks, and deeply layered tracks (and whistling, so much whistling.)
Later this month, we’ll have an exclusive interview with Bird, who stopped short of nothing — well, almost nothing — in order to recreate a classic painting for the cover of his newest album, My Finest Work Yet. Amid the historical references, he’s approaching modern political topics, too: extremism on both sides, self-sacrifice for the public good, and the way in which we engage with our enemies
He explains, “The trick of writing a message song in 2019 is finding a way not to turn off a jaded populace. That’s the real challenge. After the election in 2016, people were saying we have this sacred duty as artists, but it’s not quite that simple. If you’re too on the nose, you lose people. I had to figure out what the vocabulary was going to be for these songs, how history might play into them. If you start naming places and people ad current events, you lose people.”
For now, get primed for the month ahead with a collection of some of his best work in our new Essential Andrew Bird playlist on Spotify:
Photo illustration: Zachary Johnson
