Andrew Bird Trio Opens the Great American Songbook on New Album ‘Sunday Morning Put-On’

For his new album, Sunday Morning Put-On, Andrew Bird is looking back to the classics.

The Great American Songbook figures prominently on the album, coming out May 24 via Loma Vista Records, and in Bird’s own musical foundations, too.

“When I was in my 20s, I lived in an old apartment-hotel in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago,” he explains in a press release announcing the album. “It was cheap and inhabited mostly by retired Jesuit priests and nuns from nearby Loyola University. The gym had old Schwinn 10-speed bicycles up on cinder blocks for low-rent pelotons, an old swimming pool where they played opera, and the steam room was a clubhouse for the local Russian mob. Most Saturday nights I’d stay up listening to a radio show called Blues Before Sunrise on WBEZ from 12-4 a.m. The DJ, Steve Cushing, played old rare 78 rpm records of blues, jazz, and gospel. Then I’d sleep for a few hours and wake to Dick Buckley’s show, also on WBEZ, featuring what he called ‘Golden Era’ jazz from the ’30s and ’40s.

“My love for a certain era of jazz up through the mid-20th century has been constant through many transmutations in my own work, the bulk of which is not jazz at all,” Bird continues. “Once I had some distance between myself and this time when I was under its spell, I wanted to immerse myself in it again.”

On Sunday Morning Put-On, Bird explores songs by Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Lerner & Loewe, and more. His violin is the lead instrument, often standing in for the woodwinds of the songs’ original versions, under vocals that croon in a way that transcends time. Bird is releasing the album as the Andrew Bird Trio, accompanied by longtime collaborator Alan Hampton on bass and Ted Poor on drums, with guest appearances from Jeff Parker on guitar and Larry Goldings on piano. Sunday Morning Put-On contains one original song, “Ballon de Peut-etre,” which closes the album.

Along with announcing the album today, Bird released live performance videos of two of the songs: “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” written by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” by the writing duo of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Both were performed in California’s Valentine Studios, where the album was recorded.

Bird’s previous album was 2022 Inside Problems, an album of songs stemming from late night/early morning wrestles with uncertainties (ND review). In 2021, he reconvened with former Squirrel Nut Zippers bandmate Jimbo Mathus for an album titled These 13 (ND story).

Here’s the full track list for Sunday Morning Put-On:

1. I Didn’t Know What Time It Was
2. Caravan
3. I Fall in Love Too Easily
4. You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To
5. My Ideal
6. Django
7. I Cover the Waterfront
8. Softly, As a Morning Sunrise
9. I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face
10. Ballon de Peut-etre