HARK! Andrew Bird

• 1Andalucia03:32
• 2Alabaster03:13
• 3Greenwine03:48
• 4Christmas In April03:31
• 5Souvenirs03:29
• 6Oh Holy Night02:19
• 7Mille Cherubini In Coro01:49
• 8Night's Falling03:38
• 9Glad03:58
• 10Christmas Is Coming03:25
• 11White Christmas03:16
• 12Skating03:16
• 13Auld Lang Syne04:33
• Total Runtime43:47

Info for HARK!

Andrew Bird releases "Hark!", a new Holiday Album Featuring Original Songs, Reinterpreted Classics, Covers of John Cale, John Prine & More.

Andrew Bird has just announced Hark!, a brand new holiday album out October 30th on Loma Vista Recordings. Building upon last year's EP of the same name, the thirteen-song set delivers freshly recorded originals - including "Christmas in April," perhaps the first COVID-inspired holiday song, which Andrew wrote during lockdown ("when will we know/if we can meet under the mistletoe?") - plus holiday classics and wintertime reimaginings of seasonally ambiguous deep cuts by John Cale, John Prine and Handsome Family. For the first time since 2002's Ballad of the Red Shoes, Andrew Bird collaborated on the album artwork with his mother, who was also the inspiration for Hark!'s exquisite, solo violin arrangement of "Mille Cherubini in Coro" - her favorite piece from the Pavarotti and Vienna Boys Choir performance she and Andrew would always listen to when he was a child.

On the release of Hark!, Andrew Bird says:

Let's not talk about the dubious motives that might lead an artist to make a holiday record. It's a complicated relationship many of us have with the holidays and the requisite music we hear. So let's admit that it's a utilitarian thing. The music is just one contributing factor to our communal or solitary joy and melancholy. As a musician, it's an excuse to take a break from writing the next record and indulge in an unapologetically nostalgic exercise. I've done my best to find some lesser known gems. A passing reference to wintertime sentiment is all it takes to make the cut on Hark! A mention of snow falling in John Cale's "Andalucia," a namecheck of Christmas in John Prine's "Souvenirs" or as the setting of the drunken fiasco in the Handsome Family's "So Much Wine," remade as "Greenwine."

There's an original tune I wrote in April during the most disorienting phase of the pandemic, when I couldn't help but wonder where we'll be when the holidays come, if we could be together or not. I've been writing a lot of songs inspired by this uninspiring predicament. Let's hope they all become obsolete as soon as possible.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy Hark! And that it underscores better times.

This past Sunday, Andrew Bird made his debut appearance in the highly-anticipated premiere of FX limited series Fargo. Set in Kansas City and filmed in his native Chicago, the fourth installment of the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning franchise features Bird as Thurman Smutny, father of Ethelrida (E'myri Crutchfield) and a proto-beatnik who runs a funeral home with his wife Dibrell (Anji White). Throughout the fall he will continue to star in new episodes airing weekly at 10pm ET/PT on FX, and the next day on FX on Hulu.

On October 10th, for the first time ever Andrew Bird will live-stream a performance of The Mysterious Production of Eggs in its entirety. Celebrating the beloved album's 15th Anniversary, Andrew will be accompanied by longtime bandmate Alan Hampton. Tickets are available here via Seated, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting Andrew's longtime independent venue and promoter partners worldwide. This will be the third installment of Andrew's Performance Now! Series, which debuted in July.

For the past nine years, Andrew Bird has welcomed the holidays with his annual, hometown run of "Gezelligheid" concerts at Chicago's Fourth Presbyterian Church. He'll have news to share about this season's festivities soon, capping a year that has included his first GRAMMY nomination (Best Folk Album for 2019's My Finest Work Yet), the continuation of his Live From the Great Room performance series, and lots more still to come.

Andrew Bird, violin, vocals
Madison Cunningham, vocals
Alan Hampton, bass, vocals
Jeff Parker, guitar
Ted Poor, drums
Tyler Chester, drums, piano, percussion, Celesta

Andrew Bird
There are two types of problems in this world: outside problems and inside problems. In titling his latest album Inside Problems, Andrew Bird acknowledges the various detritus swirling around the inside. These songs are the result of snatching ideas from obsessive middle-of-the-night thoughts, organizing them, and projecting them out across the threshold to the outside. Inside Problems chronicles that moment of realization, when the inside can no longer hold us, so we move outside that brittle bubble, and we are caught for a moment in the in-between.

Over the course of his two-and-a-half decade career, Andrew Bird has always had grand ambitions for what music can be, but his method has sharpened over the years. On albums like 2012’s Break It Yourself, which cracked the Billboard top 10, he explores themes of autonomy, and how our choices ricochet throughout our lives. My Finest Work Yet, from 2020, received a GRAMMY nomination and found Bird touching on political themes through this same lens. Inside Problem’s lead track “Atomized” finds Bird wondering, “Here’s what I say to them, ‘What is your point?’/ Is each of us an island or more like Finland?” It’s a line that’s been bouncing around his head since he began writing music. “I can't tell you how many times I've written something to the effect, ‘is each of us an island or are we more like Finland?’ I've tried to say that same thing in about fifteen different ways over the years,” he says with a chuckle. It’s a testament to Bird’s maturity and accomplishments as an artist that with confidence he now simply says it.

Focusing on the “inside” allows Bird’s new music to reflect the questions that keep him up at night, and, as is more often the case, the ones that stir him from bed and keep him from returning to slumber. On Inside Problems, these ideas come to life, the songs veering from technicolor brilliance to high contrast black-and-white, and back again. As he explains it, he just seemed to stumble upon the ‘spaces in between’ in everything he did. “Crossing a threshold is as simple as going from indoors to outdoors of a house,” he explains. “I'm interested in that period of time when you're neither here nor there. There’s an unexplainable lack of clarity to it that still haunts me, that threshold between being in one place and another.”

Inside Problems is about that chance you stumble upon, and this is reflected in the album’s live spirit. Bird wanted to record the album live so he could intimately interact with his fellow musicians. So much of Bird’s music has always been about the process, because once the songs are released, his decisions are final. Spontaneity and deliberation are thus not opposites. “With my ethos and what I like to hear in other recordings, the exciting thing to me is when I hear a risk involved. It’s really important to make an album that I get excited about while listening.” That urgency is reflected on a song like “Fixed Positions,” in which he sings, “Stay here long enough you know we’ll always be this way/ And when you’re screwing up your face won’t it always stay that way?” The album looks at the radical fight against stasis, the reminder to keep on chasing what is good in this life. Bird captures the moment this realization spurs action on Inside Problems.

Bird’s career has been defined by a relentless pursuit of salvaging perfection from spontaneous decisions. “I have so much fun taking my ideas apart before they really have defined themselves as distinct songs, when they’re still in that amoeba-like state,” Bird reflects. “I love the feeling of chasing ideas and having them split off and go hang out with another idea and then budding them up against each other to see if they talk to each other.” These are the instances, the decisions within decisions, that keep Andrew Bird wrestling with music.

On Inside Problems, Bird declares that he’s still searching for this truth, but the question remains the same: Who are we in the moments in between?

This album contains no booklet.