Happy Monday — glad to have you! I hope you enjoyed last week’s album, Scatman’s World by Scatman John. If you missed it, click here.

Thank you to everyone sharing this newsletter with their friends and family — please keep it going! In honor of my birthday being yesterday, here is an album that has a song called “The Happy Birthday Song”!

You’ll automatically connect with this LP if you enjoy:

Let’s put your music taste to work.

This album has traveled from Lake Forest, Illinois, to your inbox (probably not that far away)!

Andrew Bird. What an interesting artist. I don’t want to meet Andrew Bird, because I don’t know if I’d really like him. He’s probably nice, but he also may be one of the most pretentious “indie” artists of all time. He reminds me of some high-class, trust fund a-hole in his suits and with that smug face in every picture. I actually really like his music though!

Andrew is one of those artists who seems to have been born in a lab built by a classical composer and a surrealist poet. Classically trained on the violin, but too restless to stay inside that world, Bird started bending his bow into something stranger — whistling solos, looping plucked harmonies, and dropping scientific references into folk songs as if Charles Darwin had picked up a banjo. This is his early work… his later stuff gets even more snobby in it’s subject matter. My favorite example is the cover for “My Finest Work Yet” (an already laughably arrogant title), where he mimics The Death of Marat on the cover and proceeds to sing about the divisive political climate of 2019.

But before all that, The Mysterious Production of Eggs (2005) was his coming-out party, the moment he stopped being “that violin guy” and became a songwriter with a voice unlike anyone else. The album doesn’t sound like a band; it sounds like a terrarium. Inside, tiny sonic creatures flit around — glockenspiels, toy-like percussion, and Bird’s own whistle, which sometimes feels like a bird call and other times like he’s playing a teakettle. That’s my attempt at writing in his style.

In my opinion, this is the greatest NPR Tiny Desk of all time. Especially song #2, if you want to skip there. No idea how he does what he does.

Also, I’m stealing this comment from the video: “He always looks like a road-weary salesman who just came in from the rain.”