Five Guys I've Never Met who Made Me Believe in Life Again, Part 2: Andrew Bird

2.
Name: Andrew Bird.
Age: 36.
Occupation: Multi-instrumentalist and songwriter.
High school gig: Playing at weddings, funerals, and renaissance fairs.
Influences: Ravel, Charlie Patton, Johnny Hodges.

A lifelong resident of Chicago, Illinois, Andrew Bird has never had a day job. After getting his start with swing band Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire, Bird went solo and toured by himself for seven years, usually performing to crowds of fifteen or twenty. But recent years have been kinder to him, bringing performances on David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and a sold-out show to 13,000 in Millennium Park. An avid cyclist, Andrew can sometimes be seen pedaling around the streets of his hometown, hanging up his own concert posters.

When I was in fifth grade, I pitched a fit in the Museum of Science and Industry. My parents wanted me to see the grisly wonders of the Body Slices exhibit, but I thought seeing dead people cut into half-inch pieces was unnatural and disgusting and a violation of human dignity, so I refused. I shut my eyes tight, and my parents had to lead me around the exhibit by the hand. Young Gregor Mendel I was not.

In recent years, however, I’ve found myself inexplicably drawn to the sciences. I read about neurons all the time. I get geeked about the Hadron Collider. I have photographs of zygotes and red blood cells on my bedroom wall. I even wandered around the Chicago Field Museum by myself for hours on end, and nobody had to drag me by the hand.

Andrew Bird has been my partner on this journey. His song “Anonanimal” is the only reason I can identify a troglobite. (It’s also the namesake of this blog.)



Journalists, after making smug references to his whistling and other avarian clichés, often compare Andrew Bird to a mad scientist. It’s not a hard thing to do. His tousled hair, twirling Specimen horns and constant references to all things natural invite such comparisons. In concert, I heard him refer to songwriting as “performing experiments.”

But other than his multifaceted virtuosic skills, what sets Andrew Bird apart from other artists is his subject matter. Bird writes about everything from cellular mitosis (“Weather Systems”) to the mating habits of midges and moths (“Masterswarm”) to the transmutable nature of matter (“Spare-Ohs”). The latter was inspired when all twenty-six chickens on his farm were slaughtered by racoons and coyotes, but their feathers were left behind.

“For a year after that happened the chicken feathers were still around from the massacre,” Bird says. “There’s just hundreds and hundreds of sparrows around my barn and they were taking the chicken feathers and stuffing my chimney with them to make nests. And then I would have a fire and I would see the smoke coming out and I would see little feathers reminding me of how I let down the chickens.”

Lest you think this sounds morbid, hear the song in context, as Andrew walks the streets of Paris:



Why take this naturalistic approach? Bird says it’s not the science itself that appeals to him—it’s the concept of someone looking for answers. He says he frequently finds himself writing about “a scientist who is a protagonist who is trying to quantify something—searching for some empirical formula…and he fails to do it.” Perhaps the best illustration of this is “Imitosis,” in which he tells the story of a professor seeking an empirical answer for “why kids can be so mean”:



Why do some show no mercy
while others are painfully shy?
Tell me, doctor, can you quantify
the reasons why?

As I read about this, I realized that I had come to science for the same reasons. I was looking for answers—and, like Bird’s scientist-protagonist, I was failing.

I started reading about neurons and black holes after a crisis of faith. I’d been raised as a diehard Christian, but the clichés of college and scientific inquiry had taken their toll. I began to discover some things that did not mesh with my prior understanding of the universe, and this terrified me. Unable to find a resolution, I decided to believe in nothing at all. I became an atheist.

I wasn’t a very good atheist, however. I only lasted for about three days before I snapped out of it. Those three days were hell; the universe was senseless without someone behind it, and thus I returned to theism. Even so, I was left with nagging doubts, and to resolve these, I turned to science. I refused to believe in anything without solid empirical evidence.

It was about at this time that I discovered Andrew Bird.

“There's definitely a theme on [my records] of desperation, I think,” says Bird, “of trying to hold onto any evidence that we're still alive. I think life is a wondrous thing. I'm happy to try pretty hard.”

Even so, Bird admits that he wonders how our chaotic world remains intact. “How does the earth not spin off its axis?” he asks. “That’s what you get when you’re traveling all the time: a sense of impending chaos…How does it all hold together?”

Bird echoes these questions in “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left”:



Over-prescribed and under the mister
We had survived to turn on the History Channel
and ask our esteemed panel: “Why are we alive”?
And here’s how they replied:
"You’re what happens when two substances collide..."

Are these answers enough? Do expert explanations of our functions and origins explain the purpose for our existence? Can our scientists find “the reasons why”? For a long time, I thought so. But gradually I began to realize my search for empirical answers wasn’t enough. “I feel like you’re looking for proof,” a friend told me one night, after I’d been grilling him for hours on all things scientific. “You’re not going to find it.” He was right. The more I learned, the more I felt the tension between what I knew and what I felt. If religion was my thesis, science was the antithesis.

But, following Hegel’s dialectic of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, the answers were not far behind. Strangely enough, my synthesis came in the form of an emotional experience. I found myself once again in Chicago, once again seeing Andrew Bird, this time in a tiny Presbyterian church near Water Tower Place.

Waiting in line two hours before the show began, other rabid fans described seeing Andrew in concert as a spiritual experience. Anyone who’s had this experience will tell you that the difference between seeing him live and hearing him on record is like the difference between having sex and reading about it. One is felt viscerally, while the other is understood rationally. This evening was no different.

In a black suit and tie, Andrew Bird limped onto the stage of Fourth Presbyterian Church, having injured his foot during a recent show. Without saying a word, he started to play, and filled the church with swirling melodies. As I watched him, I was struck by something remarkable. With his looping pedals and Specimen speakers, Andrew created a sonic world that was mechanical, but beautiful. It seemed chaotic, but the chaos was controlled, because there was a mind behind it—someone laying down the loops, manipulating knobs and controlling speakers.

In strictly material terms, there was nothing earth-shattering about this experience. To put it crudely, I watched a skinny man hobble onto a small stage in a small church and whip a horsehair bow across strands of nylon. And yet, the sounds he made reverberated through the rubber soles of my yellow rainboots, and I was tremendously moved. Perhaps he did just cause certain "happy feeling" neurons in my brain to fire, but he gnawed my heart out anyway. And yes, he was singing about “anthurium lacrimae decay,” but oh, was it beautiful. There was purpose to it. I watched him, and I felt like I’d come home.

This was when I realized that my stubborn reliance on empirical evidence was as silly as wandering through the Museum of Science and Industry with eyes wide shut. Our rational understanding of the world is not enough; our explanations of our biology do not tell us why we exist. Had Andrew walked off the stage of Fourth Presbyterian and left his speakers running, an onlooker might have been able to deduce where the sounds came from and how they were made, but he would not be able to tell why. It took an Andrew to explain that. (And yes, I figured this out in a church. The irony of that was not lost on me.)

I've long thought that when we say something is beautiful, we mean that it reminds us of God. Thus, I leave you with "Section 8 City," a song that spoke to me in the midst of all my struggles. Only now do I understand the reasons why.