Folks, I implore you to treat yourself and buy the new Andrew Bird album. I’ve never posted an mp3 here before, but I can’t not share this song because it makes me very happy.

If it’s not your bag, no harm done. But I can’t get over how much it’s exactly what I want to hear right now. I’m not sure how he’s reading my mind.

I picked it up in Portland last weekend, along with John Coltrane & Duke Ellington and Pharoah Sanders’ Thembi (yes, Bull Moose music was having a sale on jazz on the Impulse! label). Thembi is my new favorite Pharoah Sanders album. Formerly, it was Karma, but 1) let’s face it, he should have just called it “The Creator Is a Master Plan” and not bothered to fill up the rest of the vinyl– it already clocks in at 35 minutes with that track alone. 2) it’s not something you can just casually listen to. You really have to block out a weekend and get yourself geared up for it. Thembi is in a similar vein, but it’s more digestible. “Morning Prayer” is about nine minutes long, and so it’s a perfect song to listen to on my walk to the T: it starts when I leave the house, it’s appropriately consciousness-altering/wake-up stuff, and it wraps up just as I get to the door of the Someday.

The Ellington/Coltrane, well, it’s just not hitting the spot right now. It’s too urbane & sophistocated. Someday I’ll want to listen to it, just not right now.

But check out Andrew Bird. He picks up actual motifs from Weather Systems in clever ways (like building a longer vocal track around one of the untitled instrumentals that originally appeared on it, or using the actual phrase “weather systems” in a lyric, or picking up a glockenspiel part from the track “Weather Systems” after a line about changing atmospheric pressure). The violin playing is fantastic. The songs are clever but it’s not a junk food, witty, Magnetic Fields-y embalmed-in-its-own-irony clever. Despite the fact that he seems to tour a lot, it sounds very much like he’s been spending a lot of time alone on his farm, thinking.

I still haven’t quite gotten over the fact that we ended up seeing Interpol in Providence instead of Andrew Bird at Johnny D’s.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 16th, 2005 at 9:42 pm and is filed under music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.