Before I got into town, my friend Maggie told me that she had landed a batch of tickets to see Andrew Bird put on a VH1-style- storytellers concert at Northwestern and would I be interested in going? Uhm, of course.
I haven’t listened to much of Andrew Bird’s music, so I tracked him down on MySpace and checked out his latest album, Armchair Apocrypha. I thought it was an interesting album. If you asked me about it before the show, I’d recommend it, but I don’t know that I’d go out and spend $12 on it.
After the show, I was read to jump on iTunes and download it.
I used to play at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall while I was in high school. I was constantly amazed at the acoustics and how easy it was to hear other people playing. It only holds 1100 people, so the idea of hearing such intricate music in that venue was half of the draw.
Neither Andrew Bird or the Hall disappointed. I was sitting 11 rows back on the left hand side of the stage. I’m pretty sure that Bird heard the muffled burp that I let out half way through Why. I’m not joking.
His stage set up consisted of a glockenspiel, electric guitar, violin with two looping rigs and two giant victrola looking horns. Each of the victrola horns was hooked up to a separate violin rig and altered the sound not so subtly. One of the horns kept the melody. The other had two horns pointing opposite directions and spun in front of a microphone. The effect was to completely destroy the sound that Andrew Bird had previously looped.
It made the music sound very Phillip Glass-like.
After an hour, Bird took questions. I found out he grew up in my home town. He likes coffee and tries to tour in an environmentally friendly way. After 15 minutes of questions, he played a three song encore and closed with Weather Systems.
In that space, with that sound, it was amazing.
