From the Salmon

I made a terrible mistake.

That’s not the way I normally like to begin a review, but it’s the truth.

Here is my confession: several years ago, I pigeonholed Andrew Bird. I knew him then as an unofficial member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Chapel Hill’s neo-hot-jazz ensemble. After devouring the first couple of Zippers albums, I grabbed a copy of Thrills, the first album from Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire. It was a dark bit of fun to be sure, and it certainly showcased his fiddling prowess. But it was largely a continuation of his work with the Zippers and not very captivating, at that. When Bowl of Fire’s second album, Oh! The Grandeur, looked to be more of the same, I decided to move on.

Earlier this year, when Bird began to garner high praise from reviewers for The Mysterious Production of Eggs, I was skeptically hesitant. I’d already given him a chance, and there were plenty of other ways I could spend money on music.

Just in case you missed it at the beginning, I’ll say it again: I made a terrible mistake.

The Mysterious Production of Eggs is a shimmering marvel of whimsical pop. A few seconds of the instrumental opening track was all I needed to realize that Bird had taken up residence in a new sonic landscape: undulating layers of violin gave way to a soaring, haunting, almost unrecognizable whistle. Oh, you heard me correctly. Bird’s secret weapon is his astoundingly versatile whistle — at one moment swooping like a theramin, the next trilling like a Disney songbird.

Bird has managed to conjure up arrangements that are at once both intricate and spare. His violin does most of the heavy labor, as it is bowed, plucked, beaten, caressed, and cajoled into multilayered soundscapes where Bird’s string foundation is plied against fingerpicked guitar, skittering percussion, delicate glockenspiel, and, yes, that whistle.

Over this careful orchestration, Bird adds his laid-back, conversational tenor, singing songs about… well, here’s where it gets tricky. Or even mysterious.

Bird’s lyrics are full of childlike entrancement and exploration — a natural extension of his unexpected, fanciful sound. In several songs, he expresses a sense of wonder about life that mathematical formulas and the empirical tools of science can’t fully satisfy. Exhibit A? The sardonic opening verse of “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left”:

turn on the history channel
and ask our esteemed panel
why are we alive
and here’s how they replied
you’re what happens when two substances collide
and by all accounts you really should’ve died

In “Measuring Cups,” Bird introduces another of the album’s overarching subjects — the multifarious enemies of creative expression. In this case, it’s the elevation of mediocrity. The song opens with a verse worthy of Vonnegut:

get your your measuring cups and we’ll play a new game
come to the front of the class and we’ll measure your brain
we’ll give you a complex and we’ll give it a name
get out your measuring sticks and we’ll play a new game
can’t have the cream when the crop and the cream are the same

Some songs are a bit more opaque. Indeed, for much of the album, whimsy wins out over easy interpretation. The Mysterious Production of Eggs is clearly the work of a man who adores words. Part of what makes Bird’s songs so enigmatic is that he often chooses words more out of sheer delight for how they sound together than for what they might mean. “Fake Palindromes,” for example, begins with this stanza:

my dewy-eyed Disney bride what has tried
swapping your blood with formaldehyde?
Monsters?
Whiskey-plied voices cried fratricide!
Jesus don’t you know that you coulda died
(You shoulda died)

The last line, muttered as an afterthought, is particularly compelling. But it could have been even more so, had Bird not been so gleefully caught up in the challenge of rhyming six ways from formaldehyde.

Sometimes, Bird’s playfulness is just right. In “Tables and Chairs,” he spins a cautionary apocalyptic fantasy that starts out dark and cynical but ends with an unexpectedly elated declaration:

listen, after the fall there’ll be no more countries
no currencies at all
we’re gonna live on our wits
throw away survival kits
trade butterfly knives for adderal
and that’s not all
woah!
there will be snacks, there will
there will be snacks!!

In the end, it’s a shame that I was so reluctant to give this album a chance. The Mysterious Production of Eggs is truly a stunning achievement: unusual, ambitious, inscrutable, and yet beautifully coherent. To Andrew Bird’s enormous credit, he’s crafted an album that is elusively difficult to categorize. So I won’t even try.

Besides, that’s how I got in trouble in the first place.

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Andrew Bird’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs is available on his website, at Amazon and at iTunes. You can also stream the album in its entirety at the Righteous Babe website.