Loopy Live Life: Andrew Bird

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WHEN THE CD is dead — like, completely gone — Andrew Bird has a back-up plan in mind.

"Eventually, I want to try to do some sort of episodic thing, kind of 'Muppet Show'-style," Bird said. "Maybe if the CD is dead or dying, then the thing is more of an episodic-type thing where you take a song and kind of unfold all the little facets of the song into, like, a 25-minute show. Often times the songs I write have a lot of layers, and sometimes there's three of four different streams going on within one song, kind of like an episode where there's a couple of plot lines going on. [It could be] kind of like a musical 'Mr. Show' — that's it in a nutshell."

If he did it — emphasis on "if" — Bird could add puppet master, or something, to his already eclectic resume: singer-songwriter, guitarist, classically trained violinist, cultural commentator (for the New York Times) and — oddest of all — professional whistler.

Not long before his previous backing band, Bowl of Fire, officially disbanded in 2003, Bird started using layered loops of violin, whistles, vocals, guitar and glockenspiel to create solo, free-wheeling, improvisation-heavy live shows. He's since added musicians Martin Dash (percussion and keyboards), Jeremy Ylvisaker (bass and vocals) and Mike Lewis in recent years — and they factor in various ways on Bird's last two albums, "Armchair Apocrypha" (2007) and "Noble Beast" (2009), and add a more dense palate to the loops.

"We could do a show that's very scripted and tries to do justice to the record and gets all these parts in there and it's kind of the same every night, but for me, and the people I play with, it would be almost impossible to sustain," Bird said. "We all kind of come from a more restless, improvisatory jazz, if you will, background. And so even though we're hanging it all on this pop song, that's what we're coming from.

"Martin, my drummer, will count of the tune and I'll start playing on the downbeat, but he's actually starting to record me at that moment, and he creates a phrase from what I'm playing and he starts looping it and he has drum mics so he can layer his percussion into my loops and then split it out — my channel — and send it back to my amps, separate from the stuff he's looping to it," Bird continued. "It's hard to see it, and its hard to know and, openly, no one should really care how complicated it is — it doesn't matter really. We'll do a song that has multiple loops that have to lock together and then the next song will just be straight-up — no loops — [just] guitar or fiddle, and sometimes we just go to the front of the stage and play acoustically into a microphone. It's the full range. All that stuff keeps it, by contrast, interesting."

The band will appear with Bird during his sold-out 9:30 Club show on Oct. 28, and they won't be the only augmentation to Bird's lineup. Singer Annie Clark, better known by her stage name, St. Vincent, along with her band, will join Bird and Co., and will also open the concert. [Read our St. Vincent interview here.]

That means you'll get Bird alone, Bird with his band, and Bird with both bands. Better yet — the best part may be when everyone but Bird and Clark leave the stage. Recently, the two have performed Bob Dylan's "Oh Sister" as a duet.

"It's been an ideal bill so far," Bird said. "I've known her for a little while and we played this blogotheque thing in Paris, a sort of a party thing, and we did this impromptu thing where I played on some of her songs and we did a Dylan cover and it was pretty obvious that we had to play together," he said. "I just was very determined at the end of this — it's been a pretty long year — to not let that apathy set in that people get into on tour. ... That's what were out here to do — is to make music — to just play the same set every night would be demoralizing."

There's been a real push to make Bird a star of late — his record label had big hopes for "Noble Beast," and his album sales and live draw have steadily increased since "Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Production of Eggs" (2005). He's built his success organically, and on his own, as well. Between albums Bird's self-released live recordings and demos as the three-part "Fingerlings" series, as well the single-concert excerpt "Live in Montreal" in 2008. A discussion of his next possible live release, a concert film, prompted his earlier discussion of the hypothetical Andrew Bird's "Mr. Muppet Show."

"We just played two shows in Milwaukee, Wis., at the Pabst Theater and filmed and recorded the shows, with no days off around it, just deep in the middle of the tour," he said. (Stream or download the Oct. 16 show here.) "There was no time to get self-conscious and neurotic, and it worked. I mean, I haven't heard it, but it was definitely — one show was with the band, one was solo, so you get the whole range, and it was exactly what I was hoping [for], which is kind of loose and weird.

"That's what's been really hard to capture — just how kind of seat of the pants the shows really are," he added. "It's certainly hard to capture on film, and that's what they said after we did "Austin City Limits" [on PBS]. The camera crew was, like, 'I don't know if we can quite capture what you guys are doing — even with five or six cameras.' But when you have these false starts and kind of odd accidents, and the way you have to roll with them, that's part of the show, too."

It's clear from listening to Bird's lyrics, which are riddled with an immense vocabulary, oblique subjects and odd phrasings, that he's intelligent but also a bit strange. He's admitted to using words because they sound weird, and sometimes he makes up his own. Bird tapped into his creative process in 2008 when he penned several columns for the New York Times' Measure for Measure" blog on the songwriting process, documenting the "Noble Beast" sessions.

"I've spent a lot of my life thinking about music if not playing it," Bird said. "At first, I was a bit apprehensive; I was, like, 'Well, maybe I have a few things to say about it.' And I don't keep a journal, I don't write unless someone puts a gun to my head, which they didn't do exactly, but it was strongly recommended that I [write the blog]. I said, 'OK, well if I'm going to do it, I'm going to make it interesting to me, or try to learning something from it.' And I think I did.

"Mostly it did, then it opened up a few windows maybe I wish I hadn't," he continued. "It may not have been healthy or necessary. For the most part, it was pretty healthy, but to be that self-aware while you're working on a record — either it was therapeutic or it was, borderline, a bad idea — I don't know."

» 9:30 Club, 815 V Street NW; with St. Vincent, Wed., Oct. 28, 7 p.m., sold out; 202-265-0930. (U St.-Cardozo)

Photo courtesy Cameron Wittig