Andrew Bird and Lucius were among a slew of high-profile acts who contributed to the recently released track-by-track covers album I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to The Velvet Underground & Nico, and now they have shared an intimate live recording of their take on “Venus in Furs”,
“Venus in Furs” wouldn’t be complete without John Cale’s iconic viola solo, so it makes sense that Bird — who’s a bit of a violin legend in his own right would put his own spin on the track, using loop pedals to fill out the live performance as he then plucks the four-stringed instrument like a banjo alongside Lucius’ flawless vocal harmonies. Though nobody could compete with Lou Reed and company, this is one cover that rivals its original.
“Venus In Furs” got another recent at-home cover from Toyah as part of her “Sunday Lunch” YouTube series with husband Robert Fripp.
“I’ll Be Your Mirror” also includes Kurt Vile & The Violators’ rendition of “Run Run Run,” Iggy Pop and Matt Sweetney’s version of “European Son,”Courtney Barnett’s take on “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” The National’s Matt Berninger covering “I’mWaiting for the Man,” and Sharon Van Etten’s “Femme Fatale” with Angel Olsen.
Also in VU news, The Velvet Underground: A Documentary Film By Todd Haynes – Music From The Motion Picture Soundtrack, a 2CD and digital soundtrack that features both well-known and rare Velvet Underground tracks, was also released on October 15th, 2021 via Republic Records/UMe.
Curated by the documentary’s director, Todd Haynes, and music supervisor Randall Poster, the album is the official soundtrack for the critically acclaimed Apple Original documentary, The Velvet Underground, which was released in theatre’s and premiere globally Friday, October 15th on Apple TV+.
Music From The Motion Picture Soundtrack also features tracks by artists who influenced The Velvet Underground including a live version of “Road Runner” by Bo Diddley; “The Wind,” a doo-wop classic by The Diablos featuring Nolan Strong; and the previously unpublished La Monte Young composition, “17 XII 63 NYC The Fire Is A Mirror (excerpt),” performed by The Theatre of Eternal Music.
Andrew Bird & Lucius perform The Velvet Underground’s “Venus In Furs” live Listen to “I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute To The Velvet Underground & Nico”
For more than ten years, La Blogotheque has changed the way people experience music videos. We film beautiful, rare and intimate sessions with your favourite artists, and the ones you are soon to fall in love with. Come, stay a while, and be taken away.
Get yourself inside the magnificent and untroubled landscapes of Yosemite National Park in California. Back in August we shot two exclusives recordings with Andrew Bird and Iron & Wine.
Andrew Bird and Iron & Wine (aka Sam Beam), can see the two artists perform in the beautiful great outdoors and do so with charity and preservation in mind.
Performing from Tenaya Lake and Cathedral Beach in California’s Yosemite National Park, the two musicians demonstrated both the majesty of their musicianship and the natural world. With the onset of climate change, the two musicians are attempting to bring awareness to the very real plight, they say. The performances were sponsored by Lucky Brand with media company LaBlogothèque, which includes a $25,000 donation to the National Parks and contests for fans for Taylor guitars and other gifts that will benefit the outdoors.
“As a performer, reacting to my environment has been a constant driver,” says Bird in a statement. “From my “Echolocations” series to Gezelligheid concerts to Play for the Parks, the idea is simple: be flexible and wait for your environment to tell you what it wants to hear. With Sam Beam and Yosemite as collaborators, this was an ideal environment.”
See Bird with Beam perform “Manifest” and his new song, “Fixed Positions.”
“No photograph can prepare a person for the scale and beauty of Yosemite,” said Beam in a statement. “It was my first visit and I was completely overwhelmed! What a blessing to be able to spend it making music with Andrew Bird—and ankle deep in water to boot!”
See Beam with Bird perform his songs, “Call It Dreaming” and “Upward Over the Mountain.” Next summer, the two musicians will play a show together at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado.
“Lucky Brand has had a long-standing history of providing artists and musicians with a platform for self-expression,” said Michael DeLellis, SVP, Head of Marketing, in a statement. “Play for the Parks is our latest content series installment that highlights artists’ voices while paying tribute to our great American landscape. We are excited to share these intimate music videos with our consumers and music lovers everywhere.”
It’s been a joy to hear the music of Andrew Bird shift and change. Bird’s early music, from the late ’90s, was steeped in hot jazz and blues music from the early days of the phonograph, then later shifted to new technologies using loop pedals to layer voice, whistling and violin. His lyrics often have a calculated quality, filled with abundant wordplay and observations. Last year, Bird made one of his most personal albums, “Are You Serious”. So it felt appropriate that he would play some of his most personal work in this most intimate of settings, the Tiny Desk Concert. For this performance of three new songs, Bird came with a stripped-down acoustic band: just drums, upright bass and acoustic guitar, with Bird himself on violin. It functioned something like a hot jazz ensemble, with no effects pedals; just the songs, front and centre, sounding perfect.
Secretly Canadian is proud to present the Sojourner boxset. It is the accumulated work of thirteen musicians, five locations, four recording engineers, three filmmakers, two designers and one songwriter, including enough material for three full lengths, one EP and one DVD. The boxset includes 4 CDs a DVD, a poster, postcards and a medallion.
The four CDs that are included in the boxset are from four distinct recording sessions that Magnolia Electric Co recorded following the release of their debut studio album What Comes After The Blues. The session known as Nashville Moon was recorded by Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio studios in Chicago, Illinois. The session known as Sun Sessions was recorded at the legendary Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee. The session known as Black Ram was recorded by David Lowery at his Sound Of Music studios in Richmond, Virginia and features an entirely different cast of characters including Lowery, Rick Alverson, Andrew Bird, Molly Blackbird, Miguel Urbiztondo and Alan Weatherhead. The session known as Shohola was recorded by Jason Molina alone, with a guitar and microphone. The Road Becomes What You Leave is a film produced by Todd Chandler and Tim Sutton. It follows the band as they tour across the prairie provinces of Canada and shows the loneliness and isolation one can feel even when traveling in a pack.
Together, these make for the most ambitious and robust Magnolia Electric Co release to date.
12 years ago today Magnolia Electric Co. released the incredible ‘Sojourner’ boxset.
An ambitious and beautifully curated collection released in a wooden box, ‘Sojourner’ was the accumulated work of thirteen musicians, five locations, four recording engineers, three filmmakers, two designers and one songwriter, including enough material for three full lengths, one EP and one DVD. The boxset included 4 CDs a DVD, a celestial map, postcards and a medallion.
Ben Swanson, Secretly Canadian:
Sojourner was born out of one of the most prolific periods of Jason’s career. He’d constantly be setting up new sessions, or sending us new records – not recordings, but fully conceived records – out of the blue. He even sent one cryptically as a demo and then got upset when we didn’t find it amongst the pile of other demos (that record eventually became the Molina & Johnson record). It was extremely exciting but admittedly a bit stressful from the label perspective. We were sensitive to the Prince dynamic with Warner; of not being able to keep up and do justice to the work. Jason was also – actually not unlike Prince now that I think about it – in the midst of this transformative period away from the old Songs: Ohia moniker and material into a new, more expansive name, Magnolia Electric Co (at the time, he had the idea of a multi-headed beast. Several different “Electric Co.”s coexisting). We desperately wanted to keep pace with Jason but could never catch up. Eventually we landed on the idea of leaning in to the situation and suggested we put all this material together in a box. At first it was purely a practical innovation to reset the clock, but eventually came to find the opportunity to showcase Jason’s range. My memory is he loved the concept out of the gate and immediately began dreaming of a box stuffed with music, a Ouija board, a constellation map and a chicken bone. Tokens from his universe. In hindsight, Sojourner ended up as the most complete representation of Jason’s expansive world that rewards repeat listens. At some point we’ll have to put it out on vinyl. Maybe there will be room for the chicken bone.
Andrew Bird is an internationally acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, whistler and songwriter who picked up his firstviolin at the age of four and spent his formative years soaking up classical repertoire completely by ear. As a teen Bird became interested in a variety of styles including early jazz, country blues and folk music, synthesizing them into his unique brand of pop. Since beginning his recording career in 1997, Bird has released 13 albums and performed extensively worldwide. He has recorded with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, appeared as “Dr. Stringz” on Jack’s Big Music Show, and headlined concerts at Carnegie Hall, Sydney Opera House, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and festivals worldwide.
This collection of six songs was recorded at home during shelter in place.
When it occurred to me that “Manifest” would work well as a duet I thought of Erika right away because her voice is so deep and grounded,” says Bird. “Not to get all mystical on you, but it just sounds like the earth. She brought something new to the song and hearing that other voice can make you listen in a different way. I don’t like to preach in my songs. Manifest just lays it all out there alongside the incontrovertible evidence of an environmental tipping point and says, ‘don’t pretend you can’t hear.’ I’ve been a fan of Erika’s since we used to tour with Heartless Bastards to her solo work. She doesn’t sound like anyone else. Unbridled and unpretentious. A true artist.
“I had recently reconnected with Andrew on another matter, and he just happened to be thinking about adapting Manifest as a duet at the time. Lucky me!” recounts Wennerstrom. “When I listened to the lyrics I identified with them very closely. I have had deep growing concern of our environment the last several years, and I think it’s very important this issue stay in the forefront. Andrew is such an incredible talent in every aspect of his songs. The writing, the playing, and his wonderful voice. He’s the whole package. I’m a huge fan, and honored to work with him on something.”
Andrew Bird’s “Manifest” featuring Erika Wennerstrom of Heartless Bastards
Illinois songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird is back with his 12th solo album “My Finest Work Yet”, and it might actually live up to its name. These 10 new tracks find Bird doubling down on the heady folk storytelling that we’ve come to expect from him, but in a way that feels more immediate and of the moment than ever before.
Ambiguity, like virtuosic whistling and erudite lyrics, is a hallmark of Andrew Bird’s music, but it’s seemingly absent from the title of his latest album, On which the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter has dubbed “My Finest Work Yet”. The other superlative in the discussion around the 10-track album, is that it’s Bird’s most political or topical work to date, thanks in part to the Lake Forest native being forthcoming about the real-life events that informed tracks like “Bloodless.” But My Finest Work Yet travels further back than the 2016 election,
In addition to raising the question of whether this is his finest work yet, the conversation around the album has also been about it being maybe his most political work to date. My Finest Work Yet certainly explores a lot of divisions in this country.
There are all these songs that have made it across airways that are dealing with anything that’s going on now these are troubled times, And I think what better medium than songwriting to go in deep and figure out what’s really going on and maybe offer suggestions of how to get out of it. So a lot of the songs, from “Archipelago”, “Fallorun” to “Bloodless” they’re dealing with this deal that’s been made that we’re somewhat unwittingly being played by these people that are profiting through algorithms and whatnot on this division, and just amplifying it. And the more they amplify it, the more they seem to benefit from it. It’s just taking things that have always been there, and exploiting them, and making them worse for profit. It has to do with a certain aspect of human nature that’s been around for eons. But it’s just that attraction one has to their enemies—what space, what void in us is being filled by our adversaries? And how that gets our horns locked and we can’t pull them out. And it’s that sort of intimacy, that need that’s being filled by your adversary. What would happen if you just walked away? They’d probably really miss you, you know?
AB: Yeah, I kind of stumbled on that word, “Fallorun.” I kind of ran the two together. I was going through, like, five different possible choruses that were all way too heavy-handed, I think. “Fall of throne.” And then my wife thought I was saying “fall or run,” instead of “Fallorun” And I thought, “That’s actually better than ‘fall of throne.’” And so it is talking about that fight-or-flight instinct. And it’s just sort of addressing that, “What is patriotism?” And the verse is, beyond those first couple lines, “What if Trump were not human, he was just an algorithm that takes all our worst impulses as people and amplifies them and exploits them, turns them on us?” That’s effectively what we’re dealing with. It’s just almost a reflection of ourselves in a way.
“Manifest” is the latest song to be released off the album. AB: Yeah, I guess I was thinking about fossil fuels—just that term is kind of interesting in how it points out that what we pull out of the ground and put into a combustible engine is the result of millions of years of plants and animals dying and being compressed underground and being fossilized. But I also wanted to look at the afterlife for those organic things. There’s still energy contained in that organic matter, and that’s what we’re doing, is spending the last bit of energy of that life form. And from there it becomes vapor, so it’s almost like the ghost of that thing. There’s a certain poetry to all that, as frightening as it is. So that’s mostly what it’s about.
The first line is like, “Coming to the edge of the widest canyon.” I was imagining the Spanish explorers coming to the edge of the Grand Canyon, and in that moment thinking, “Whoa, we just got to the end of it all.” That’s how the song kind of started, but the chorus is talking about the tendrils, the fracking, these things going deep into the ground to find every little bit of fossilized fuel. The video that’s out at the moment is just us in the studio, but there’s an official video coming out in, like, a week and a half that’s an animated thing that kind
“Cracking Codes” feels like one of the “bread and roses” moments on the albums; it’s more personal, AB: Yeah, it sounds more like a love song than anything else on the record. The chorus is about either telling the truth, or just being able to tell if someone is being true—that search for truth relates to everything else on the album. And through it I’m just talking about how even without words two people can, through body language or just even atmosphere that one creates with energy, that you can just tell if someone is really who they say they are. ’Cause it’s quite straightforward. I wrote that song very quickly, and so it hangs together better than anything I’ve written in a long time.
How would you come to realize this is your finest work yet? You have an extensive discography, which means you have a lot to compare. Is it kind of just like a gut feeling in the middle of the night after finishing recording.
Having such an extensive discography makes me saying something like that about myself more okay,
AB: I really liked “Inside Problems,” but that didn’t really make sense for these songs. I was really trying to convey this idea of horns being locked, of a struggle of two wrestlers just starting to make out or something. Two people or sides, just so close and so intimate, yet locked in the struggle. And I couldn’t figure out a way to do that without it being just too much. So I gave up on trying to encapsulate the whole record with a few words, and that process just seemed kind of silly on record No. 14 anyway. So I just went with this somewhat tongue-in-cheek statement.
But that being said, these songs on the album do feel different to me. There was an urgency in the writing of them that felt different, like I had a purpose even though I was still kind of doing what I was always do, which is pay attention to what’s around me and process it.
These songs make up this kind of path to war, from trying to avoid it on “Fallorun” to spouting propaganda on “Proxy War,” and then there’s a call to “Don The Struggle.” Is the album closer, “Bellevue Bridge Club,” intended to bring an end to the conflict?. That song, I’ve been writing for a long time, five or six years. It went through so many versions. As opposed to “Cracking Codes,” which took a half an hour, this one took years. And eventually I scrapped everything in the song except this line, “We’ll be playing bridge in the psych ward with Barbara, Jean, and Sue.” I had the hardest time working backwards and figuring out what makes that line make sense. All I knew is that that was the best line in the song. The original idea was someone coming home from the Great War and seeing horrible things and just wanting to have a boring life, or in this case, suffering, or recovering from shell shock in the psych ward just playing bridge, and wanting to live in a small town.
Something that’s been happening on the last couple records is that I embrace the second voice that enters in my head as I’m writing a song, the one that’s a bit critical of the song. I think it’s a refreshing thing, and usually people don’t choose to put their own self-doubt in the song, they usually try to block that voice out. But I kind of like to embrace ’cause it gives us a break from the first-person narrative that you’re listening to through most of the record. And so that’s where that line comes from.
Andrew Bird is back with a new album aptly titled “My Finest Work Yet”. Andrew Bird has put together his creative dream team to bring his new album and campaign to life. Bird has enlisted author Dave Eggers to write his bio (more of a Q&A that will be included in the album packaging), renowned photographer Amanda Demme (Mark Ronson, Die Antwoord) and creative director Matthew Siskin (Beyonce, Father John Misty). The result will be a highly conceptual, creative marketing campaign with strong visuals to match the powerful music that Andrew has crafted for this album.
All tongues and cheeks aside, “My Finest Work Yet” finds Bird grappling with themes of current day dichotomies and how to identify a moral compass amidst such divisive times. “I’m interested in the idea that our enemies are what make us whole—there’s an intimacy one shares with their opponent when locked in such a struggle. If we were to just walk away would our enemies miss us? How did we get to this point and how can we, through awareness of it, maybe pull ourselves out of this death spiral,” says Bird.
Andrew Bird has collaborated with Fiona Apple on the song “Left Hand Kisses,” its the second song he’s shared from his upcoming album Are You Serious after the rocking “Capsized” “My inclination was to write a song about why I can’t write a simple love song. The song began as an internal dialogue,” Bird says of the track. “At first it was just my voice. Then another voice came creeping in and I thought ‘this should be a duet if I can find the right person.’ I needed to find someone really indicting. She was totally committed. The session was a long whiskey-fueled night — unhinged, for sure. All worth it, of course. I can’t write simple love songs. People are complex.” Man, a long whiskey-fueled night with Andrew Bird and Fiona Apple sounds incredible.
Montreal’s Yellow Bird Projectworks with musicians to create T-shirt designs that benefit a charities of the artists’ choice; they’ve printeddesignsby the likes of Bon Iver, Best Coast, Tegan And Sara, Grizzly Bear, Rilo Kiley, and many more.
Now they’re moving from coverings by indie rockers to covers by indie rockers, Andrew Bird’s chamber-pop reworking of New Pornographers’ Mass Romantic sugar rush “The Fake Headlines,” The organization that allows musicians to raise money for different charities. The project’s debut covers compilation is called “Good People Rock”, and features “friends covering friends and strangers covering strangers,” like Hayden covering TV on the Radio’s “Family Tree” and Whispertown’s version of Rilo Kiley’s “Give A Little Love.”
Andrew Bird’s rendition of the New Pornographers’ “The Fake Headlines” mixes light melodies and crisp harmonics with beautifully plucked and bowed strings.
The Fat Angel Sings 