Andrew Bird is the Mark Twain of modern musicians. His craft is flawless; the entire world celebrates his fiddle work. His subjects are atypical, he doesn’t sing about the worn out clichés musicians cling to so desperately. He’s equally comfortable singing songs about food as the sludge on the bottom of the ocean, of time travel or the cartographic explorations of the tangles in his true love’s hair.
Despite his mastery, his music is approachable, digestible to us lay folks who still struggle to bang out three chord anthems. And despite the college level reading required to navigate his lyrics, the effective use of the whistle combines high art with a more modest, mid-west peasant stock perspective.
Enjoy this video. It contains no slick recording tricks. There are no dancing ladies, or sub-plots, or shiny lights to make the music more appealing. In it, Andrew Bird walks the crowded cobbles of Montmartre, singing a song about birds. His fiddle is absent, but that git-fiddle is put to good use in his hands.
As the song ends watch the camera man pan around to show a dozen or so passers-by, tourists, businessmen, the odd pedestrian—all arrested, quite literally arrested—by the song ‘Spare-Ohs.’
