Andrew Bird on stage fright, the Lusitania and his latest, Break It Yourself

If you count the records with his former band, Bowl of Fire, Andrew Bird has released nine studio albums, six live albums and six EPs, all in the span of 14 years. That feat doesn’t include appearances on dozens of other recordings, including discs by Charlie Louvin and My Morning Jacket; a recent art installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; or his cameo in The Muppets in 2011. The Chicago native is releasing his 10th studio album, Break It Yourself, March 6 and stops at the Uptown this week. The Pitch spent a recent weekday morning chatting with Bird about his new songs, naval history, and how he’s a hater of stuffed animals. Sorta.

The Pitch: Do you think your extensive musical training informs your pop-music path, or is it more like everything commingling in your mind all the time?

Bird: I’d say more the latter. The way I started gave me a lot of flexibility. I learned by ear, so everything was kind of like folk music to me in the sense that it was all soaked up, as opposed to the written. I learned music like a language, so that when I hear other languages, I pick them up very quickly, like osmosis. My teachers wouldn’t like to hear this, but I was pretty self-taught.

Was it your parents who exposed you early on to music?

It was my mother’s idea. She was committed enough that she played violin with me for the first year — just so it wasn’t like me against her. She was into it, and that helped a lot.

Was reading as important to you growing up as making music?

I don’t know. I was a pretty well-rounded kid until around like 17, when I got really devoted to violin. Before that, I was pretty into everything, you know? Yeah, I would read and write poetry as a teenager. I read a lot on my own. I liked history. I didn’t particularly do well in school, but it didn’t matter. It was my own stuff.

You weren’t really interested in school?

Yeah, I guess I was self-taught in that regard as well. I thought the curriculum was watered down, and I did terribly on test scores and reasonably well in school, but I would just go off and read my own stuff that I was into. A lot of it was better than what they were giving out in school.

Who were some of your favorite authors?

Well, back then in the teenage years, I was into the heavy romantic stuff like Dostoevski, but more in the last 10 years or so I’ve been into Saul Bellow and Graham Greene. I like novels that have a historical tense so you can hear how people talked in a different time and place. I like dialogue and to hear the vernacular.

Are there any similarities for you in the process of writing prose or lyrics and in writing music? Or is the process entirely different?

No, there are some similarities in the sense that a melody will get under your own skin, and your own idea is just playing in your head. It’s kind of like the Top 40 radio station of your own ideas — the ones that really get under your skin are the hits. The same thing happens with words, like a certain phrase will occur to me, and I don’t know why, but everything I see around me makes me think of it. I know I have to pay more attention to it. Then I don’t know, the dust gathers, you know, more residue with time, and you have more than enough there for a song. So it’s similar. It’s a little harder to harness the state of mind that you need for the words. The melody will come, barring major disastrous distraction.

You said something a couple of years ago about a line that you had in your head about the Lusitania. Did that finally make its way into one of the new songs?

Yes! Finally. It was a long time coming. That’s a good example. That line occurred to me, and I thought, “That’s a great line, but what the hell do I do with it?” But like I said, it gathered other ideas like, while thinking of the Lusitania, what else happened that threw the U.S. into international conflict? I think the sinking of the Maine is even a better example of a fabricated — well, I can think of more recent examples, but I felt like staying around the turn of the century with it. The whole idea of laying mines along the shore turned into using naval history as a metaphor for a doomed, codependent relationship.

Who’s the woman singing in that song?

That’s Annie Clark [St. Vincent]. 

Are you two friends?

I’ve known Annie for years, and I was just finishing the song up when we were on tour together, so I asked her to sing because the second verse felt like it was a different point of view. She gets the more upbeat point of view. It felt like the static electricity between two people.

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You’re known for tinkering with some of your songs, even while performing. From your perspective as a songwriter, is a song ever finished?

No, I hope not. I’ve just resisted the idea that a record is some definitive kind of thing. You know, the practical thing: You’ve gotta play the song almost every night for two years – well, you don’t have to but you’re out there. That’s the industry cycle, you know. You gotta play these songs. And I’m just not the kind of musician that’s content to do it like the record. I would be unhappy with that. I keep trying to change it up to find that moment of inception and make the song precarious again, to get that feeling of slight embarrassment, like you’re playing it for the first time.

Do you think nervousness makes you better, or is it just more interesting to you that way? Or is it just that you like the spontaneity of it?

I think it’s the spontaneity, and I think it makes the rest of the set more musical, I think, if it’s a little bit more precarious. I don’t like, at other shows, for it to feel scripted. Even between songs, if I say the same thing I did the night before, I feel like a chump. I can’t get around it, and there’s a certain amount that you can’t help. The muscle memory will want to take over from night to night. But I always feel let down when a show goes as planned.

You’ve said that as you have gotten older, you have come to understand more what it is to create space in your music. Does that mean that you have a greater appreciation for simplicity or that you have just become more patient?

I definitely have noticed that I can appreciate certain bands that I would have found incredibly boring when I was younger.

Like who?

I just did not like pop music when I was younger. Of course, I liked the Beatles’ White Album, but otherwise I was kind of in my own universe. I just didn’t understand pop songs from the ’80s where the chorus would just beat you down over and over and over again. Making loops has forced me to be a little more cyclical, but it’s almost entirely linear. I don’t really go back and repeat anything. I missed the Band earlier on. I think I would have found that kinda dull when I was younger. Or bands like Kraftwerk — I would definitely not have been into that when I was younger, but I dig it now.

This past December, you collaborated with Ian Schneller on a sound installation at the MCA in Chicago. What was that experience like for you? Are you interested in more types of work like that in the future?

Yeah, it’s this whole other facet of thinking about performing and creating. We just haven’t figured out a way to create any revenue out of it, but we’re hoping it’ll get picked up by museums as an installation, maybe as public art eventually. What’s cool for me is not just the visual aspect of it, which is 96 flowerlike speakers set up in a field, but the idea that I can get up in the morning and get my coffee and ride my bike to some open space and compose for three hours and be done. Instead of being all tweaked out all day and getting onstage where everyone’s focused on you. I found it amazingly gratifying, like no one’s looking at me, and it’s nice.

It seems like those performances were pretty intense.

It’s hard not to feel pressure onstage to be something, rather than just playing and being satisfied with it.

“Danse Caribe” really sticks out on Break It Yourself. How long have you been working on that song?

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The lyrics I wrote in New Orleans while I was working on [Martin] Dosh’s record, and I wrote them really fast because he just needed something for me to sing. It’s based on a childhood experience. My mother tells me that at 15 months, I exiled all of my stuffed animals from my crib. I wanted nothing to do with these false comforts. So I drew that out a little further. And that’s not actually a steel drum; it’s something I do with my violin.

Really? How do you get it to make that sound?

I have a filter that’s a handmade pedal that makes the violin sound more metallic. You hear it a lot on the record. People think it’s either a guitar solo or a steel drum. It’s just pizzicato, but yeah, and sometimes the whistling with it will give the illusion of a steel drum.

Which of your new songs are you most excited to perform on this tour?

A lot of them I’m excited to play because, with a few exceptions, they weren’t produced or constructed, and so what you hear is what happened [when recording]. Something happens, I’ve noticed, when we do “Eyeoneye,” and it happened on the recording, too, where it just gets this jolt of kind of raw power, I guess. And I’ve never really felt like that on a song before, and I like it.