What a looper

Singer, violinist, whistler and loop pedal operator, Andrew Bird brings an amusing weirdness to his musical output. He talks - from his sick-bed - to Peter Crawley

ON the night of his first Irish performance, Andrew Bird put on a brave face. The flu that had come perilously close to scuppering this gig may have been taking its toll, but he tried not to let it show. This was no mean feat: the Chicago singer-songwriter, violinist, guitarist and unerringly good whistler is, essentially, a one-man band. His astonishingly precise knack with a loop pedal allows him to sample his violin live, steadily building intricate patterns of brisk pizzicato and swooping bowed lines, to which he adds beautifully opaque lyrics, weaving layer upon layer of sound.

When we meet the following day, Bird is ensconced in as many layers, wearing, by my count, four tops, a woolly hat and a huge scarf coiled around him like a woolly cobra. The heating in his hotel room is turned up full, his flu harder to conceal. "Do you mind?" he asks, and climbs into his bed, pulling the covers up to his chin. Perched there in a duvet fortress, Bird admits to having felt impaired.

"When you play 200 shows a year," he says, his slow caramel voice a little thicker than usual, "a lot of those shows are going to be not in your best state. So you try to incorporate it into the show. Whatever my state of mind is becomes part of the show in a way. So if I know I can't quite execute it, or my motor skills are a little off, I just kind of amplify it a little bit. You know what I mean? Just try to amuse myself with that weirdness."

There's an amusing weirdness to much of what Andrew Bird does. His album titles are a good example. Armchair Apocrypha, his excellent new record (and sixth overall) follows The Mysterious Production of Eggs, the best place for newcomers. Both are products of a curious musical evolution and an awkward relationship with groups.

Trained in the Suzuki violin method from the age of four, Bird learned classical music completely by ear. After an unhappy time in a classical conservatory ("I love the music," he says, "I just didn't like the social atmosphere of an institution.") he turned to Chicago's traditional Irish music scene, training his arm to play the backbeat, then moved on to early-jazz revivalists, using improvisation to service a melody, then folk, then pop.

"Any time I got into a scene that started to get too competitive or too cliquey, I wasn't that comfortable. I was just kind of left with going from one style to the next." Having flirted with various band arrangements, a few years ago Bird retreated alone to an isolated barn in northwest Illinois where he worked day-in, day-out on his music; something he calls "a self-contained vacuum of your own creation".

"After several years of having up to a five-piece band, it was really nice to have total control - and no emotional baggage of a band," he says. "To be free of that, for one, and also to be able to indulge myself. I can completely reinvent the way that pop songs are thought to be made. Not that it's that grandiose. I'm not reinventing the wheel or anything, but when you get total control you can actually conceive of it.

"Moving out to the country meant no more record collection, no more radio, no more media - an imperfect vacuum, but more or less putting yourself in the place to really figure out what you're doing and what you sound like."

Dividing his time between the barn and the stage, Bird became more flexible with his songwriting, performing half-developed pieces for the audience and, as he says, "opening it up for questions". The happy result is that his songs are inevitably hard to classify and never seem quite finished. Lyrically elusive - "The process is a bit like creating puzzles," he will say - they exist in various versions among several albums, while particular themes are frequently revisited.

"It's a nice combination of knowing what you're doing, but you don't know what's going to come out of you," he says of his performances. "I try to write songs that I can reinvent night after night. Even if I've written a song, it's just a bunch of chords and notes, and you have to remind yourself of that. You can reinvent anything."

The show, he tells me, becomes his only connection outside of his self-imposed vacuum - and it shows. Bird has a disarming tendency to kick off his shoes early in every live set and I wonder how comfortable he makes himself onstage. "It's bizarre," he smiles. "Bizzare. Because I'm mostly very uncomfortable around people in general, socially. But when I step on stage I'm almost completely comfortable. It's always been the case. I've always been a super quiet, nervous kid. Then I get up onstage. That's where I'm completely myself, I think."

By his second performance in Dublin, Bird's health had greatly improved, and so had the size of his audience. At the end of the show, one fan left a thank you note on his glockenspiel, folded into the shape of an origami swan. When the venue was clearing the musician crept out to retrieve it, and regarded it with quiet appreciation; one bird to another.

See/Hear:See a live Andrew Bird show at www.fabchannel.com/andrew_bird or hear him whistle and sing on www.myspace.com/andrewbird.

Armchair Apocrypha is out now on Fargo