Live at the Logan Square Auditorium, Chicago
Words by The Mono Lake Salty Bath Company//Illustration by Elliot Kurtz
As with any multi-instrumentalist, Andrew Bird faces a peculiar problem in live shows: how to recreate the layered, symphonic sound of the album… in real time. The problem is compounded by the fact that Bird himself plays most of the instruments on the studio recording. But Bird and drummer Martin Dosh tackle the problem head-on – if you need more Andrew Birds, duplicate them.

Before Bird even took the stage, Dosh demonstrated. Surrounded by a kit, a Moog, and a small loop box, he tapped the drums with sound-check abstractness – here a cymbal, here a flush on the floor tom, then a pause. It wasn’t until the next eight measures, when he began playing a few chords on the keys, that I heard the drum pattern he had just played. In a moment, the newly-played chords appeared on top of the drums and he moved into the higher registers, adding trickling melody lines before moving back to the drums to drop the steady beat.

In only a few minutes, he had built a working musical structure, leveled and layered and filling the room – and it was into this that Bird came on. Surrounded by his instruments, like a surgeon, he added details, harmonies, deftly switching instruments between measures.

What emerged, after a few more loops, were the complete backing tracks of “Nervous Head Motion of the Head to the Left” – a whistling track, two violin tracks – one pizzicato, one bowed – over which Bird sang and played guitar. The result was not a replication of the album’s sound. Instead, it was an onstage replication of the artist – Bird and Dosh, backed by Bird, Bird, Bird, Dosh and Dosh.

Each song was built in this way, from the ground up. The show was part music, part architecture.

There is, however, a philosophical question that must be addressed and it is this: what does it mean to have a “live” performance? After the Milli Vanilli lip-syching disaster of 1990, the idea of “live” has become problematic. An artist merely being a physical presence in a room while his/her pre-recorded music plays is hardly “live.” In the case of Andrew Bird, then, what responsibility does the artist have to represent himself in the purest form?

Part of us would have liked to have seen the stripped-down trio perform as just that – sparse, raw, without the smoke-and-mirrors of electronics. On the other side, however, there was no “laptop backing band” that other trios have relied on – using the “push-the-space-bar-and-sing” technique, which blends the line between musicianship and karaoke.

Yet this was not Milli Vanilli or anything of the like. The show actually was, in a strange way, live – the sounds were created in-house, in front of our eyes. We watched the fingers press the strings. Then, we watched the fingers find harmonies that the earlier fingers had not been able to reach. In a few minutes, a song had been created from scratch – the loop pedals acting more like another instrument than a cheap filler.

Aside from a few songs from Eggs (“Measuring Cups,” “Skin Is, My” and the encore “Tables and Chairs”) and one from Weather Systems, much of the set was devoted to Bird’s new album, recently finished, due out in March. These songs seem to carry much of the same energy as Eggs – rhythms that braid over themselves and melodies that weave genres together to make strange sweaters – Chicago blues progressions glazed over with bow strokes in those vaguely Eastern Dorian scales – long draping songs that hang like Southern gothic vines, and songs that rise like hot-air balloons and drift quietly and intricately over cities.

It’s Andrew Bird – that’s about as concrete as it’s going to get.

Andrew Bird
Righteous Babe Records