To begin, a reading from the book of Calvino/if on a winters night a traveler Chapter 11: Verse 27
“Gentlemen, first I must say that in ( ) I like to ( ) only what is ( ), and to connect the details with the whole and to consider certain ( ) as definitive; and I like to keep one ( ) distinct from the other, each for what it has that is different and new; and I especially like ( ) to be ( ) from beginning to end. For a while now, everything has been going wrong for me: it seems to me that in the world there now exist only ( ) that remain suspended or get lost along the way.”
I find that if you fill in these productive gaps (once filled by the former author but emptied by the current author) with verbs and noun phrases that refer to music, you will approach a clear definition of my fellow-feeling about the act of listening to music.
Blocks of listening time, in which you are engaged and simultaneously disengaged with the experience of music, are curious epistemological anomalies. What are you doing whilst listening to music? Are you really listening? With what do you listen?
Do you listen standing up? Do you listen sitting down? Do you take your music to bed? Do you let music wake you up? What role does music play in your life? How do you interact with it? Or, better yet, how does it act upon you? Do you simply let the waves bounce off you like some huge sounding wall, reflecting, refracting and reverberating until suddenly a break in the sound.
Andrew Bird’s music came into my life whilst I was an innocent abroad. His senescent melodies and songs about science entered my soft fleshy psyche like a gentle balm, soothing to the touch. And yet, my first impressions of his then current release “The Mysterious Production of Eggs” were not whole-heartedly favorable; I was impressed but I was nowhere near floored. Until “Fake Palindromes.” “Fake Palindromes” hit me one day as I was walking to my film class; I don’t know if everything seemed to be harmoniously colliding with the crescendos of the song’s multiple climaxes or if i was just particularly receptive to the track’s lyrics about a “Dewy-eyed Disney bride what has tried/Swapping your blood with formadehyde” who wore “red lipstick and a brown pair of shoes/knee-high socks what to cover her bruise.” I imagined the heroine of this song as a classic rock ‘n’ roll femme fatale; the slinky, destructive goddess of deceit and death that would talk to you all night about Star Wars and Paul Auster only to leave you reeling in a pool of your own blood when you woke up the next morning. Whether it was the content or the particular listening block, I was hooked on Andrew Bird from that particular moment.
“Fake Palindromes” is one of a series of epiphanic songs that defined my time in England as a period of rampant self-discovery and blushing love of art; other tracks topping this list of glimpses into the transcendent outer sphere of existence are “The Book of Love” by The Magnetic Fields, “You Can Have It All/The Crying of Lot G” by Yo La Tengo, and “It’s All Gonna Break” by Broken Social Scene. Now, when I listen to this particular mix of music I am apt to wax Proustian about my days of Guinness and train stations, long walks in the wonderfully bitter cold, and fish finger pizzas.
Seeing Andrew Bird in concert was a revelation; his albums are like observation tanks for organisms that live, breathe, dance and rebuild themselves out of nothing on stage. Andrew Bird is less a musician than a sound artist, though I don’t mean that in the post-modern sense; his musicianship is of the highest order, though his methodology of performance incorporates an active construction of pieces of songs, looped and timed precisely in front of the audience. In short, my reaction to his performance shifted between speechlessness and dancing slowly to myself out of sheer joy.
