Today’s song comes from Andrew Bird, someone I became obsessed with at the beginning of Fall Quarter, when I would come home from a day at school, lie on the ground, and listen to “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left” off the album The Mysterious Production of Eggs.
A lot of his songs don’t have high replay value. They sound good at first listen, which is usually a harbinger of short-lived enjoyment. Whenever I like a song the first time I hear I it a little part of me is always sad because I know the following process is about to happen: I’ll listen to the song about 15 times in a row. The first five or so times I’ll be in a state of relative ecstasy, writhing around on the floor and more or less thinking to myself, “Holy fuck this song is good.” Then the second five listens I’m less excited about the song, but it still feels good on my ears. By the last five listens I’m just trying to reclaim (futilely, of course) the feeling I got from the first five listens, which is a doomed process.
This sort of happened with “A Nervous Tic,” but “A Nervous Tic” is so ridiculously good that the process was dragged out about twice as long, ultimately making it about twice as painful. In my opinion, it’s the best song Andrew Bird has ever produced (by far). It feels like getting your ear licked by an angel. But, like I’ve discussed, it sounds amazing at first listen, which is always a bad sign. The song of the day today did not sound that great at first listen — and actually still doesn’t sound that great — which makes it a prime candidate to one day become a classic, or at least a classic in terms of Andrew Bird. It’s from his first album and it’s 100% violin–no lyrics–which is quite a bit different from his later songs (I’ve also included “A Nervous Tic” just in case you never listened to it when I raved about it in blog posts past).
Here they are:
P.S I should also note that for whatever reason “St. Francis Reel” reminds me of something young boys in Virginia might have listened to before marching off to die in the Civil War. It has that sort melancholic, longing feel.
This entry was written by , posted on December 15, 2009 at 4:11 pm, filed under Music and tagged andrew bird, armchair apocrypha, music of hair. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.