Andrew Bird has a well-deserved reputation for fastidious craftsmanship and quirky songwriting—every sound and syllable in his art-pop ditties feels carefully chosen and freighted with significance. The Evanston native was a young violin prodigy, schooled in the Suzuki method, and once he turned his attention to original songs in the late 90s, his spongelike brain made almost every style and approach accessible to him. He soon sharpened his focus, and since the mid-aughts he’s enjoyed great success. Though Bird is essentially writing pop music, he draws deeply from the well of Americana—the same source that Brett and Rennie Sparks, aka the Handsome Family, have plumbed to help create their rich repertoire of gothic country songs. The couple formed the band in 1993, when they still lived in Chicago, and in 2001 they decamped to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they’ve continued to make excellent records—Brett delivers Rennie’s witty, morbid, poetic lyrics in a droll baritone that redoubles their power. The Handsome Family recently got an overdue shot of mainstream attention after their song “Far From Any Road” was used as the theme for the HBO series True Detective; they play their next Chicago show on Friday, September 5, as part of the first day of the Hideout Block Party & A.V. Fest.
AB: And I needed to be present. Someone very close to me has been ill, and I’ve got a three-year-old. I didn’t want to retreat into my own thoughts so much. So [working with your songs] allowed me to go deep enough to access the things that are really satisfying about songwriting and the process, but I was still able to be there for everybody.
AB: I had a kind of frightening thing happen when I was finishing my last record, where Randy Newman decided to stop by and hear some mixes. And I’d met him before, but yeah, it was just, “By the way, Randy Newman’s gonna stop by.”
BS: Yeah, well. He wouldn’t be wrong.
BS: The weird thing to me is that more people don’t do it. Like, I know people personally that say, “Ehh, I’m not really like a word guy. I’m not really a lyricist. So, you know, I just focus on the music.” And then, of course, they have shitty lyrics.
Sat 8/16, 8 PMChicago Theatre$39.50-$49.50All ages.
