Home to roost

In the winter of 2002, when he was 28 and his friends were contemplating relocations to New York or Los Angeles, Andrew Bird moved from his Chicago apartment to a chicken farm in western Illinois. Like most decisions in the life of the classically trained violinist—who, as a child, would chew food to melodies in his head—the move was prompted by music. "I figured I would bring my band out there," says the singer, who at the time was leading the eclectic pop group Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire. "But it became a very solitary, personal thing—I couldn't bear bringing people to my barn and not have them appreciate it as much as I do."

The suburban Chicago native, who performs in the tidy button-down shirts and sports coats of a man about to meet his girlfriend's parents, fell into a daily routine unthinkable in city life. "I'd wake up, go to the chicken shack, get eggs and make an omelette," he explains. "Then I'd start to play. The next thing I knew, the sun was going down and I hadn't groomed or brushed my teeth. I didn't anticipate to what degree the change of environment would affect my music."

Rather than inserting the rural lilt that one might expect, Bird refined his songwriting while in the barn. Whereas his music was once garnished in early jazz and Gypsy sounds, Bird's latter-day work unearths a debonair pop sophisticate. On The Mysterious Production of Eggs (Righteous Babe), the first LP to reflect his life on the farm, he constructs plaintive songs around violin and guitar. At times, Bird laments oppressive institutions and fading adolescence; more often, he chronicles the fog of childhood.

Bird went through an even more dramatic transformation as a live performer. Having shed his band, he began taking the stage as an orch-pop army of one, employing a system of pedals to loop his instruments, accompanying his own playing in what's essentially a nightly tightrope walk. "Watching him keep that together always held me," says Howe Gelb of Giant Sand, who has toured alongside Bird. "People in the independent realm with formal training have to find a way of being okay with the punk ethic. The few that figure out a compromise have a huge palette to draw from—and I think that's what happened with Andrew. He's formally trained, but still maintains a dignity of noise."

From Bird's vantage point, his success in the pop world corresponds to a lifelong uneasiness in the conservatory. He managed to complete Northwestern University's music program, a self-proclaimed "nervous wreck" throughout; he claims to have gotten surprisingly far with his studies before learning to read music. And despite his years imprisoned in tiny practice rooms with a violin, some of the most striking passages of Bird's new album emanate from a less proper instrumental device: whistling.

"Next to breathing, whistling is probably the thing I've done most in life," says Bird, adding that his unusually shaped tongue gives him a broad tonal range. "It was right there under my nose, but it wasn't until recently that I considered it an instrument. I think this mentality was part of my classical upbringing—you have to suffer to get something nice."

The same might be said of Bird's time in isolation—which, in recent months, has been curbed. The musician has once again taken an apartment in Chicago; when he plays New York this week, he will be accompanied not only by his loops, but also by a drummer, Kevin O'Donnell. Bird still stays at the farm for stretches of time, but his chickens have mostly disappeared, falling prey to prowling coyotes.

His rural experience left an indelible mark on Bird's work. "Lately, when I go out to the barn, I might play the same two chords over and over for a week," he says. "You'd think after years of studying music, playing two chords wouldn't hold much for me anymore. It's reassuring that it has the opposite effect."