photo by Paul D’Amato
Chicagoan Andrew Bird is featured in today’s NYT Sunday Magazine. I like how the critic describes Bird’s music.
Bird’s sound is not easy to categorize. His songs are swelling and orchestral, the legacy of years spent studying classical violin at Northwestern University’s prestigious conservatory and elsewhere. He has been compared with the Irish rock singer Damien Rice, but Bird’s sound is also distinctly American, part of a new wave of folk — free folk, psych folk or freak folk, as it has variously been called — that has grown in popularity in recent years. His songs have a pastoral, homespun feel, but they also have a darkness and emotional complexity not typically associated with folk rock.
Bird’s new album, “Noble Beast” will be released Jan. 20 on Fat Possum. If his last effort, “Armchair Apocrypha,” released in 2007, is any indication, Bird’s fans have something grand to look forward to.
Here’s a track from the new album: