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Andrew Bird


I picked up Andrew Bird’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs when it came out in 2005, after finding “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left†on some blog that’s surely dead now. I played that one a lot; its charmingly obscure, polysyllabic manner spoke to my teenage outcast self. But due to poverty and circumstance I never got to see Bird back then, when he would perform pocket symphonies armed with only a violin, a guitar, a loop pedal, and his mellifluous voice (oh, and a damned powerful whistle).

Those days have long passed for Bird, who used to venture to Athens to play the Caledonia Lounge and now packs out the Georgia Theatre. But he paid them something of an homage with his opener, emerging alone on the instrument-cluttered stage to play a solo version of… well, one of those old songs. The arrangement was so different that I couldn’t seem to recall which one it was. This held true throughout the set. Bird altered his melodies and phrasing constantly and with the appearance of spontaneity, to the point that some songs were barely recognizable outside of the lyrics (and even those weren’t sacred—songs readily flowed into one another, Bird skipping the odd verse along the way).

The results were occasionally cluttered, and the backing band sometimes seemed to barely keep up, but this approach also did a lot to make Bird’s long set unpredictable and breathe new life into his backlog. And for a violinist whose carefully crafted pop songs tend to hide his classically trained virtuosity, Bird’s playing was surprisingly showy, filled with fiery and complex solos over layers of pizzicato figures, his fingers dancing, his eyes closed and head swaying.

But of course the simplest moments were among the best. Of the older songs, “Plasticities†was probably closest to the original, and its chorus soared like it only threatens to on record. And occasionally, Bird and his two sidemen would gather around a single condenser mic, in the old-timey style he uses on his upcoming “companion album†Hands of Glory, to play covers of old folk songs and stripped-down versions of originals. While the noisy crowd threatened to drown them out, these performances found Bird breaking from his somewhat aloof demeanor to display a real warmth and engagement, less with his music than through it.

Photos by Kaden Shallat. See the rest on our Tumblr.

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