ANDREW BIRD
SEPTEMBER 12, 2007
CAROLINA THEATER, NC
WORDS AND PHOTOS BY AW HENDERSON

Andrew Bird is about the classiest guy you will ever meet. That is, if you count attending a concert as "meeting." He has everything: a smooth voice, a glib humor, good looks, a casual demeanor, and a voice that would make a master jeweler's handiwork look coarse and unrefined. Watching Andrew Bird perform is like listening to an anecdote about your grandfather when he was young, all full of exaggeration and twinkling hyperbole. He didn't really walk on stage in a suit, only to take off his shoes and socks and place them neatly to the side, did he? Did he actually bring a stuffed monkey with him, and then walk off stage with it at the end of the show? He did it all, without a hint of affectation. He is, in many ways, an heir to the throne of Tom Waits, albeit much less boozed up. Even though the whole thing is an act, you can't help believing it.

Mr. Bird has done a lot of growing up since the last time he came through North Carolina, when he played Chapel Hill's Local 506. At that show, he was full of energy, plucking his violin with vim and strumming his guitar with vigor, pausing intently for as long as it took to nail down the exact riff he wanted to loop. He was a musician who was just about to make it, having recently released the highly successful Andrew Bird and the Mysterious Production of Eggs, and the potential energy in the room was easily transmuted into the kinetic energy of dancing, singing, laughing and happiness. But now, in the hushed darkness of Raleigh's Carolina Theater auditorium, Bird cuts a lonely and beaten down, but not defeated, figure. He looks like he's been through rough times since the last time he saw us, and he sings like it too. It's all a ruse, of course, which is made plain as soon as he activates the goofy spinning contraption (it looks like two phonograph trumpets welded neck to neck, and, as far as I can tell, it has no function whatsoever) sitting behind him on stage and launches into his music. He does exercises a restraint in this setting that wasn't there in the smoky bar, which I suppose is not tremendously surprising given the posh environs his success has earned him the right to play in. This Andrew Bird feels like the character that the old Andrew Bird was a charcoal drawing for. I'm not sure which I prefer, but it seems clear which of the two he prefers.

The set list flowed one song to the next with the inevitability of a well-spun narrative. Bird has the talent to entertain a room full of people all by himself, without at all coming across as a "one man band." It's true he builds his songs from layers he plays himself, so that ultimately what he is playing is not what we are hearing at any given moment, but it never feels like a gimmick, always feels like he's just that good at entertaining. Whistles, strings, swoops, violin plucks, guitar and his melifluous voice combine like layers of frosting in a decadent cake served on borrowed china. My favorite songs from the night all came from Eggs, a personal bias, but not a single song sagged. The quietly reverent effect that Bird's voice evokes, coupled with the sly irreverence his barefoot and immaculately messy posture nevertheless effects, put me in a daze for the duration of the set. Parallels to Tom Waits resurfaced in the resigned way in which he left the stage: after an encore that peacefully capped off the night, he picked his shoes up in one hand, his stuffed monkey in the other, and walked barefoot into the darkness of the curtains. In a very real way, he was stepping off into the next part of his career, and his life. I don't know whether the character of Andrew Bird is drawn from reality or fantasy, but I hope that wherever it is he goes after his show each night, he continues to find inspiration there.