Track By Track: Andrew Bird – Inside Problems

Andrew Bird has built a masterful catalogue, one that asks profound questions.

Lockdown may have brought impositions, but it also granted the songwriter and composer a chance to catch his breath, something he didn’t take for granted.

New album ‘Inside Problems’ was constructed from this vantage point, and it’s a song cycle built around soaring highs, and epic lows.

Out now, Andrew Bird completes a North American run alongside Iron & Wine shortly, with the album settling into the gravitational orbit of his fans.

Andrew comments…

“From Orpheus to Icarus, depths to heights, and the thresholds in between. I’m interested in the moment when something becomes something else, when somewhere becomes somewhere else. That membrane that separates inside from outside. Retreating as we do in to the underlands, to molt our plumage, to exorcise our inside problems and emerge like newborn foals shaking, naked, squinting in the light. Don’t you know that I’m an irrepressible optimist working with a fatal flaw?”

Dive in below, then check out an exclusive Track By Track guide after the jump.

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Underlands

You just don’t know what’s under the surface, be it the land, the sea, our skin. You could be whistling away, projecting contentedness, when really there’s a swirling twisted mess underneath.

Looking up, there’s the knowable universe but unless you get into astrology, you’ll find the stars don’t owe us anything and you’re left less assured than when we thought gods threw down lightning bolts. ‘Underlands’ introduces an album that deals with the unseen underneath and the membrane that separates your outside problems from your inside problems.

Lone Didion

I’m close with someone who used to be the Hostess at a New York restaurant where Joan Didion and her husband were regulars. They came in one Saturday in December 2003. Then some weeks passed, and she came in alone and ordered the usual. This was the time she chronicled in the year of magical thinking when she lost both her husband and her daughter.

I couldn’t hear this story and read the book and not write a song about it.

Fixed Positions

Unless you make a major effort to break from routine and get a different perspective, as you get older, you are destined to become more and more conservative, paranoid and xenophobic. So, let’s not let that happen, OK? 

Inside Problems

Most animals go through some kind of molting process. I’m convinced I do as well. It’s not very pleasant and it’s more psychological than physical, but when it’s done, I feel pretty damn good.

The Night Before Your Birthday

My version of a love song. Have a listen to ‘Certainty’ by Big Thief after listening to this song and then we’ll discuss.

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Make A Picture

WTF just happened? The last three years: pandemic, uprising, insurrection. How do you tell the story for yourself and others based on these snapshots in your memory?

Atomized

“I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart.” – Joan Didion, 1967

Didion was updating WB Yeats for the fractious 60s, this song takes it to the pixelated present where it’s not just society that is getting atomized but the self that is being broken apart and scattered.

Faithless Ghost

Kind of the outlier here. Inspired by John Cale’s ‘Paris 1919’ (that date keeps coming up). The coy ghost that never shows up when you want it to. Hmm.

Eight

I like this number.

Stop n’ Shop

Guns, walls, trucks, obelisks, horse, and rider. If you need these things to feel whole, then there’s something terribly wrong.

Never Fall Apart

Attempt at answering the question posed by ‘Stop ‘N’ Shop’.

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