My Actual Favorite Record of the Year

I knew when I discovered Armchair Apocrypha last year that I’d found something special in Andrew Bird. This was an artist I wanted to savor. So I let my obsession with that album play out before I sought out another one of his records. It took about a year. By March of this year I felt I was ready to dive into another: Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs, from 2005. Like Armchair, it went on to become my most listened-to album of the year. Not only that, I was astonished to find a Bird album that was better than Armchair. Eggs is a masterpiece.

It’s a more melancholy album than Armchair. Although it has its moments of humor, it rarely gets as upbeat as the first half of that album. That turned out to be just fine for me: 2008 turned out to be melancholy year, to understate.

Part of why Eggs became so important to me, besides its more tangible qualities—great songs, stellar musicianship, etc.—is that it happened to enter my life just when I needed it to. I owned it for maybe one or two weeks before I was called to my childhood home to be with my dad for the last few weeks of his life. It was an ordeal, to say the least. a time of communal grief shared with aunts, uncles, sister, brother, wife, stepmother, mixed with a kind of simultaneous loneliness and introversion that can’t be articulated. Music, as with any other event in life, is there to be one’s psychological wallpaper. I’ve written about that already, the music I went to before, during, and after.

Eggs held a unique place at that time because it was mine. It wasn’t an album my entire family could find comfort in, like Graceland; it wasn’t identifiably my dad’s, like the O Brother soundtrack or Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms. It wasn’t even an album to be shared with my wife, despite the amount of time we’d later spend listening to Eggs for the rest of the year. At that point, only I knew the record. I would eject myself from the house occasionally, off on a walk through my old neighborhood, sometimes venturing further from home than I’d intended. It was me, my headphones, and Andrew Bird. Because of Armchair, Eggs was familiar enough to embrace—to be embraced by—without reservation, yet strange enough that it gave my mind something to focus on. I had a conversation with Eggs for two or three weeks straight. We still talk sometimes.

Bird’s lyrics can be like a game, as you listen to how the sounds of the words melt into each other. “You took my hand and led me down to watch a papillon parade / and we let the kittens lick our hair and drink our chalky lemonade”—the words beg to be mouthed. The more familiar the songs become, the more meaning reveals itself—Bird is a wordsmith, not a gibberish peddler. In those early, difficult weeks of listening to the album, those meanings had yet to come through to me. Stray lines from each song wafted through my head, crystallizing into something that, combined with the wistful tone of so many of the songs, felt custom designed to my situation. “I was getting ready to be a threat,” Bird sings in the opening track, “Sovay”—as if to say that something had been cut short. The next song begins with a question posed to a panel of experts: “'Why are we alive?' / Here was their reply: / 'You’re what happens when two substances collide / When by all accounts you really should have died.'” That existential wonder manifests again in the gorgeous “Masterfade” as a child gazes into the sky “full of zeros and ones” before “you took my hand and said I shouldn’t be afraid.” The next song, “Opposite Day,” cries over and over, “Today was supposed to be just another day”—a cry I repeated to myself, attaching my own moribund meaning, over and over. Throughout the album there was a lyric or musical motif (“Sovay,” “Measuring Cups,” “The Naming of Things”) that seemed to comfort or commiserate.

Of course, the album in fact was not that literal. If anything it is an album about adolescence, not death. For a son watching is father die over a period of a few weeks, an album about adolescence presses the emotional buttons better than anything else. At any rate Eggs is not that sad of a record. It’s certainly not a stereotypical wallowing record. And that’s just it: Eggs helped me not wallow (not too deeply, at least). As melancholy as it could be in some places, it was also quite optimistic in others, if not downright humorous. That might be why it has managed to become more than just the soundtrack to one of my life’s lowest points. My personal story aside, it is an undeniably outstanding album, perfect from beginning to end. In Pitchfork parlance, this is a 10.0.

As I’ve been saying in a few posts here and there, I think 2008 turned out to be noteworthy for a lot of albums—sure, they’re good—that sit pretty comfortably inside larger trends of the last few years. I’m thankful for Andrew Bird, whether last year, 2005, this year, or next (Noble Beast comes out in a matter of weeks), because he is truly an individual voice in music right now. His strengths—lyricism, composition, musicianship, whistling!—are singularly his own. He’s got at least two stellar records to his name already (I’ll let you know when I get to the rest), and likely one more to come in less than a month. Happily, almost a year since I bought Eggs. I think I’m ready for it.

• Andrew Bird, Masterfade

 

Comments

[Sam/RaptorAvatar]

OK, this thing sounds amazing (already smiled just reading the title versus the "sky full of 1s & 0s" line) I guess my paralell to this would be Titus Andronicus's "Airing Of Grievances," which I loved on it's own but which was also there for me when I lost my cousin a month or so back.

[jordan]

My girlfriend just came across your blog (notably the 'albums of my life' post), and sent me the link, as you seem to be following a very similar progression of artists and albums as I have in the past few years (to a creepily similar degree). Furthermore, my brother writes for one of your side-linked music review sites (PopMatters).

Since we seem to have the same taste, I figured I would fill you in on another great musician -- Destroyer. I see you are a fan of The New Pornographers, and Destroyer is the solo work of New Pornographer Dan Bejar. I first got hooked on his albums after downloading "Hey, Snow White" from his "This Night" album. His music, like a lot of the the music you and I seem to both enjoy, is complex and often takes quite a few listens to realize how fantastic it is (but once it 'clicks', it's pure gold). Hope you like it.

[scott pgwp]

Thanks Jordan! Glad you like the blog, especially that post, which was part of a run of posts I really enjoyed writing.

I have Destroyer's Rubies, which is a great album. I have misc songs from some of Bejar's albums but I've yet to delve too deep. Thanks for the recommendation.

[jonathan686]

Excellent post. I'm listening to Noble Beast now and it appears Andrew Bird is not letting up any time soon.

I agree that Mysterious Production of Eggs is a near flawless record, at once heartbreaking and hilarious. Opposites Day is a perfect example.

That said, his live show trumps his albums. He's a must see, especially when touring with Dosh. He and Dosh both use loop pedals to build layer upon layer of sound. The result is recognizable, but unique at each performance. Fine art from a thrilling artist. And that whistling!