When Andrew Bird, the warm-voiced singer and musician (famous for his whistling and violin playing), picked up the phone after I dialed the 14-digit number to reach him in Ireland where he was to play at the U.S. Embassy, he told me he’d been up for two days straight. “I left my house yesterday at noon,” Bird says, “and got to Dublin a couple of hours ago. I’m here in a very strange place. I’m technically on U.S. soil in the middle of a massive park surrounded by green fields.” 

What followed was a 30-minute conversation about Bird’s orientation to music as a child, what he thinks about his latest record, Are You Serious, and what it was like coming out from under the shadow of the ’90s swing band, the Squirrel Nut Zippers. If you love him as much as we do, check him out May 19 at The Showbox. 

I want to talk to you about your latest record, but first I was wondering: What was your relationship to music growing up? 

I was immersed in it. I started playing violin when I was 4. My mother is an artist and she wanted her kids to play classical music. So she put us in Suzuki, which was thankfully only classical music in repertoire, otherwise the style can be pretty folky, really. So I learned completely by ear, that’s the idea of Suzuki. I didn’t learn to read a lick of music until I was 15 and by that time my ear was so big I could always learn music faster by hearing it. 

Did you enjoy music when you were a kid? I know when I was a kid I loathed my piano lessons…

For the first couple of years it’s just something you do. It’s a little bit that you stand there in an uncomfortable position and you get a little impatient as a kid, but I didn’t hate my lessons. I kind of liked them. I wasn’t a prodigy but I was really into tone and had very visceral reactions to tone and texture and that was kind of my thing. I was a musician and I had good tone but I didn’t practice my scales. I resisted anything that felt mathematical. So I just kind of kept it free and loose and somehow made it through conservatory training with that attitude. 

I never quite fit with the program but I was musical enough to get by. I’m glad I wasn’t fully indoctrinated. I’m glad I didn’t do what was expected of me because I’d probably not be doing music if I had. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything — if anything I’m at risk of being over-educated. That’s usually been more of the problem. You know, I came out of school in Chicago and I was checking out these indie rock shows in the mid ’90s and it was this curious thing to me. What is this? I came out of orchestras with very strict violin teachers and this serious music world and then I saw people who were almost celebrating how poorly they played and how out of tune their instruments were and how raw and unmanicured it was. A lot of times I didn’t get it and other times it was pretty awesome. 

So I was coming at that world – there’s a lot of things about this [indie rock style] that makes sense, though I do think, like, you should work on tuning your guitar and the sound of that amp is just brittle and unlistenable, but I get it and I get what you’re doing. I was always trying to show, when in the classical music world, telling people to check out this awesome music by this composer – I remember playing Stravinsky with this trio and every movement of the piece was different, there was tango, swing, references to all these different types of music but there was a failing of notation in the piece because it’s just impossible to notate all these feels. So I brought examples to the group, saying here’s some genuine tango and swing from the ’30s. They didn’t want to hear it, they were like, ‘Dude we’re getting graded on this!’ It was such a resistance to that idea of improvisation. I’d want to improvise my own credenzas in Beethoven violin concertos. Back in the day you were supposed to improvise, but no – I had to play transcriptions of someone else improvising. By the time I got out of there I didn’t look back. 

Looking toward your latest release, what was the most important moment in the studio or in conversation leading up to its production? 

Well, I was not on any particular schedule. It was more a mandate to be scarce for awhile. So there was no particular time pressure, but I was writing pretty consistently. I would write all the time and after a year or two a lot of stuff accumulates. 

Every record, I come in with some sort of intention that either gets completely forgotten or discarded or it’s something you actually follow through on. In this case, I actually followed through on it. You make 13 records, been around for a while, I don’t tend to look back at myself with so much self awareness, but I seem to have a reputation for being whimsical, acoustic – people have called me “chamber pop” – all these things journalists throw out there that make me bristle and I’m like, I wanna make a really groovy, hard-hitting, super tight record. So I used a different approach to drumming this time, I wanted the songs to be more vetted and more externalized than ever before. I wanted to make a record that was useful – you get fairly deep into the record before you get into some of my more esoteric tendencies. And I feel like this record got – whereas on other records there are one or two or three key tracks, useful tracks, tracks that could possibly appeal to broad groups of people or cut through the bar at 2 a.m. or play at the ice skating rink (laughs). 

A lot of times the way I make records, like Noble Beast, which was made from the vocals to the drums, it didn’t really do that, it didn’t really cut through. They succeed on other levels, but this I wanted to make a utilitarian, useful record for as many humans as possible. 

The record seems brighter than some of your last albums, like Noble Beast, which at times seemed dripping with melancholy. Was that intentional or just a result of the recording process? 

I would say that may be true with some exceptions like “Chemical Switches,” which definitely harkens back to an older process, and that is definitely melancholy. Melancholy can mean a bunch of things. It’s happy and sad and you can accomplish that in lots of different ways. People hear “melancholy” and think sad, but the point is it’s a perfect mixture of the two. You have the song, “The New Saint Jude,” which is bright and exuberant but you check out the lyrics and it’s anything but. “Capsized” has a slightly dark, slightly pimpin’ feel in a minor key. I’m drawn to dark and bubbly textures. Maybe the brightness [you’re picking up on] is in the way the record is mixed. It was done old-school analog, which I always like to do. The word I kept using was that some of the music felt more “brutal” or reaching for your gut more overtly. 

You’re so well known for your violin playing and you’re very prolific on the instrument, why do you continue to challenge yourself with it? 

There’s times when I put the violin in the corner and purposefully ignore it or when I do play it I abuse it and it sound not like a violin. It’s a tricky instrument, it’s been around for a long time and it has a lot of associations that can be distracting to songwriters or what you’re trying to do. For instance, “Chemical Switches” is a completely live track – it’s me and Blake Mills playing guitar. As often happens, I just whistle the melody part and it ends up being so honest and pure and seemingly off the cuff, which it was in this case, that I went about replacing it with the violin and no matter how I played that melody all these associations came up. Like romantic Celtic myths and I was like, get out it’s horrible (laughs). So it can be really tricky. 

People always point out that there’s a violin in the band. I can’t believe how many people see the violin and point to it. It’s kind of always threatening to marginalize all the work I’m doing just because I play the violin, but at the same time there’s nothing else I can have more of a blast or more fun playing. There’s no other instrument that I have that kind of ease with. So, I pick up a violin and play it in a way I know only I can play. With guitar, I don’t know what shit is, it’s more primitive and it kind of grounds the song. Violin allows me to go off in flights of fancy. 

What would you say has been the biggest obstacle in your career? 

Well, early on it took a long time to get out from under the shadow of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, that’s the first one. When you write fairly complicated tunes and you show up to gigs and there’s a sign saying, “Swing dance lessons tonight” – this is so long ago, but the promoter would actually organize a swing dance class to our set – I didn’t spend my whole life working to become an accessory to a fad. 

I was and still am an early jazz fanatic. But at a certain point you realize, “Does the world really need to hear this or is this what I have to offer to the universe: a reasonably good version of something that’s been done before?” Once I realized that’s not my destiny, then I spent four to five years to get to a place where that wasn’t mentioned anymore.

Check out Andrew Bird with Fiona Apple here: