Quote

Some of your best songs come from a desperate attempt to escape, so sitting in an airport for hours I can just start pulling out little fragments of songs from my head. A lot of times a melody will just occur to me and be my companion for a couple of months.

Andrew Bird

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Andrew Bird
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: July 11
Fiddler
Film Editor
Guitarist
Jazz Musician
Musician
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Chicago
Illinois
Andrew Wegman Bird
Andrew W. Bird
Times
Escape
Airports
Song
Songs
Fragments
Littles
Sitting
Occur
Best
Couple
Pulling
Little
Months
Companion
Come
Head
Melody
Start
Desperate
Hours
Attempt
Airport

More quotes by Andrew Bird

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With the words, a lot of things start with questions. Some word kind of piques my interest, and I love the way it sounds, but I really don't know what it means. And I honestly don't care for a while.
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Norman is a very up-close, personal, character drama and I'd like to do something more zoomed out, a little more pastoral, some sweeping epic. I'd like to try something different.
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There's a lot of interesting words, nomenclatures, in science.
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I think life is a wondrous thing. I'm happy to try pretty hard.
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I think any songwriter or record, no matter how good it is, can become tedious if it's the same person's point of view. After four tracks, you start to get worn down no matter how good it is. It can be relentlessly good, but it's still going to wear you out.
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I didn't have the patience for the research, or anything like that. I just like how it sets the imagination off. It's just an area that's very fertile for great words. Great metaphors, potentially.
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If you take a little time, let's say three weeks off, after recording a song, and you listen to it every other day, you're just going to know eventually.
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The real drag is trying to fly from country to country, day of show, with all your gear. You get hassled all the time. It's hard trying to keep it together.
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A good espresso to me is a little bit salty you just become used to a good taste. Anytime I go into a new place and they don't clean their machine properly or the water temperature isn't right, it tastes awful.
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Sometimes I think I don't have much choice in the matter. It's just what happens, and I'm following my instincts the whole time.
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The instrumental record is a bit subtler. It's the kind of stuff on sound check, when I first pick up my violin and start to play, the kind of melodies that just pour out of me. Some of them sound very classical. Some of them sound experimental, polyrhythmic loops that I make.
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Playing the violin and singing and whistling are just three different ways of making sound.
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The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.
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Sometimes the word dictated the melody.
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I haven't had that many people onstage for a while, and I'm looking forward to that. They're all such creative musicians in their own right. They're all complete individuals. They're not just a pick-up band. They all have their own thing going on.
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I have some irrepressible pop impulses to write an appealing, concise song. And I also have some irrepressible kind of restlessness as well, and I need to keep myself interested. When I'm left to my own devices, there's a struggle.
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No, it's not dissatisfaction that inspires me to tinker with my songs, it's just restlessness.
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It's like you don't know you're making a record unless you're half-killing yourself.
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I still kind of believe this absurd line that if you have to write it down, it's not worth remembering.
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My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.
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