Lyricists write about the world we live in, and most of them choose a layer or two and stick with them. The human, religious, and geopolitical layers are the ones that get the most play in popular music, for obvious reasons. They're immediate to our everyday existence-- we're more likely to think about the role love plays in our day than the role of cell division. Over the course of his career, Andrew Bird has gradually added more layers to his songwriting, very often intertwining the political with the microscopic, the humdrum with the fantastical, the made-up word with the pointed phrase. Pop music is steeped in a certain kind of language-- it's largely informed by a spiritual and emotional understanding of the universe. Rational understandings of the way things work and the hidden worlds behind the world we experience simply haven't established much of a foothold in our emotional vocabulary, but Bird has probably made more strides toward developing this kind of vocabulary than any other prominent songwriter.
Break It Yourself, his latest album, opens with a song that jumps right into these kinds of concerns. "Desperation Breeds" wrings more than a little haunt out of the precipitous loss of bee populations, and from there, we're off to the races, winding through ruminations on the way death's promised end point can inject meaning into life's mundane moments ("Near Death Experience Experience"), to "Sifters", whose point that the "moon plays the ocean like a violin" works both metaphorically and literally. Certain themes recur. One is the slipperiness of truth and memory-- "Lazy Projector" throws itself straight into wondering how much of our memory is our own, while "Lusitania", a duet with St. Vincent, transposes the thought to collective memory, capping a verse that touches on events from World War I and the Spanish-American War with the line, "We don't study these wars no more."
Another recurring theme is perhaps more germane to the sound of the album. There are several moments where Bird seems to grapple with his own decision to distance himself from the world on his farm. He's working much more collaboratively with a band on some songs here than he has in a long time. Lead single "Eyeoneye" is a pretty straightforward indie rock track by his standards, though honestly its bashing straightforwardness makes it one of the least captivating songs here. Still, though, when on "Danse Carribe" he sings, "Then one day you'd had it/ Exiled your closest advisors," it sounds like he's talking to himself, even as his band builds around him. The song is one of his best, picking up a completely unexpected Afro-Caribbean groove halfway through, then mixing it with the type of fairly traditional fiddling he hasn't done much of since he went off on his own and rebuilt his tonal vocabulary around his layered violin, whistling, and glockenspiel.
The fact that he has his own sound is essential to making all this work. A lot of people I know find Bird's lyrical flights unpalatable, and many feel the same about the whistling, but for me, it all amounts to a constructed world that sounds outré at first but winds up being a startlingly astute reflection of our own as you settle into it. The world is so much stranger than we commonly assume, and I like that Bird points his lights into the quantum corners to gain a different perspective, and does it while committing to the quirks of his own strange sound. That strange sound becomes positively majestic on "Hole in the Ocean Floor", an eight-minute fever dream that caps the album with just a few words scattered through the soundscape of looped and layered violins. It's a piece of music no one else could have made, on an album no one else could have made. And it's a little like the world-- the longer you live with it, the more the details become apparent and the more you can feel it all working together.
