Quote

The problem is, when you're working with orchestras, you only get the orchestra for about two hours before the performance to pull it all together, and that doesn't sound like a real collaboration.

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
Problem
Pull
Together
Performance
Real
Performances
Like
Working
Hours
Sound
Orchestras
Doesn
Orchestra
Two
Collaboration

More quotes by Andrew Bird

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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.
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Playing the violin and singing and whistling are just three different ways of making sound. It's not trying to replace a band, per se. It's become a completely different thing. And it's not just simply an effect. It's just a very surprisingly intuitive thing.
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I've done my share of busking, and it's fun until it isn't. There are musicians in the subways that will make you cry, they're so good.
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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.
Andrew Bird
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I have the barn, it's just kind of like a studio. Almost all artists have la studio to work in, and that's really what it is. A place to get away. I'll spend maybe four days out there if I can, just completely immersed - like where I don't bathe or brush my teeth for a few days, just get up and make coffee and experiment until the sun goes down.
Andrew Bird
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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.
Andrew Bird
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It's not set in stone. I like to keep it rolling and changing, and so I am like, Great, I get to remake my song.
Andrew Bird
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I think when I was pretty young I got really into the tone of my instrument and I remember just playing one note for an hour to just kind of feel the resonance of the violin.
Andrew Bird
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When I start asking my friends, What do you think this means? And it leads to way more interesting conversations than what it actually ends up meaning in the dictionary. Like apocryphal, for instance.
Andrew Bird
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My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.
Andrew Bird
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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.
Andrew Bird
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I've always had levity in my songs, so I like to turn things over, twist them around, and make fun of myself.
Andrew Bird
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The music that I write is often not necessarily full of doom and gloom. You'll notice in most of the darkest songs, the music is actually pretty peaceful and lulling.
Andrew Bird
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Songwriting requires some sort of ceremony to even get the process started, and it can be somewhat arbitrary.
Andrew Bird
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All the folks I play with come from jazz backgrounds or at least appreciate spontaneity within the parameters of a pop song.
Andrew Bird
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What you see at the Field Museum is only like, 10 percent of the collection. It's birds of paradise and passenger pigeons and in all these drawers that pull out, these specimens come out and it's spectacular. And it worked out.
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I've always found that whatever you say about indie rock, it is the most inclusive genre or title for anything. It doesn't pin you down too much, like other labels would. It's just newer, it has less baggage.
Andrew Bird
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With digital sound just becomes simply information, not the sum of its parts.
Andrew Bird
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There's songs that could either be taken as a conversation between two people, like The Privateers, or Why, from a much earlier record. Or Glass Figurine. That's my version of a relationship song.
Andrew Bird
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There's been this perception that Europeans still hold on to, that they discover the real talented ones in American culture and give them proper credit and that's not true anymore - it used to be. A lot of jazz musicians would get respect in Europe.
Andrew Bird