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You can build up expectations for a song before you record it, and then it's like nothing's good enough in the studio.

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
Good
Studios
Like
Expectations
Record
Build
Records
Song
Nothing
Enough
Studio

More quotes by Andrew Bird

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Most records, you build from the drums and bass up. This one, we started with the vocals in Nashville and recorded them live with just the guitars and tried to make that complete and lovely-sounding without any adornment at all. I really wanted to get something with the vocal that I've never gotten before Armchair Apocrypha.
Andrew Bird
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The orchestra's an amazing instrument, but I don't want to just arrange my songs for it. I think that might be kind of boring and a little bit overdramatic, perhaps. I'm still just having too much fun doing it my way, for the time being.
Andrew Bird
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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.
Andrew Bird
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The earth almost looks like it's packed down and dense from so many feet treading over it.
Andrew Bird
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What you see with your eyes when you're making music is going to have a profound effect on what you hear.
Andrew Bird
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I'm a terrible Scrabble player.
Andrew Bird
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There is something comforting about going into a practice room, putting your sheet music on a stand and playing Bach over and over again.
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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People who are thinking about your music almost as much as you are, that almost never happens.
Andrew Bird
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The idea of writing songs because you're depressed and you need to communicate it somehow, that isn't really true for me.
Andrew Bird
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There's always a tension between wanting to write a really concise, instant gratification type song that gets under your skin the first time you hear it, and wanting to really stretch out. I think it's a healthy tension.
Andrew Bird
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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.
Andrew Bird
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There's always that struggle between me wanting to keep [song] new and fresh and then be - I can never get with pop songs being so repetitive.
Andrew Bird
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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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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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No, it's not dissatisfaction that inspires me to tinker with my songs, it's just restlessness.
Andrew Bird
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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 am, in some sense, a writer. Even though I kinda downplay the word thing, I do enjoy writing sometimes.
Andrew Bird
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Songwriters can sort of get away with murder. You can throw out crazy theories and not have to back it up with data or graphs or research.
Andrew Bird
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Just don't let the human factor fail to be a factor at all
Andrew Bird