Until now, singer-songwriter-violinist Andrew Bird had a reputation, entirely deserved, for making albums that were esoteric and concise, more interested in rational concepts like science and language than in more slippery things like emotion.
His latest release, “Are You Serious,” is a warm and unexpectedly personal ode to love and domesticity: Bird, who was raised in Lake Forest and made his name in Chicago, is now married with a young son, and living in Los Angeles.
In a recent phone interview, Bird, who plays the Pritzker Pavilion on Sept. 7, talked about leaving Chicago, working with Fiona Apple (on the “Serious” duet “Left Handed Kisses”), and the drawbacks of getting personal.
The following is an edited version of that conversation:
Q: Do you find that when you release a more personal album, you take the reaction to it more personally?
A: I don’t worry about the audience’s reaction, they’ve always got my back, but in a more journalistic forum, it’s a different story. That’s been a learning experience, learning to talk about the content of the songs, or the story of the record in interviews. I’ve resolved not to do it. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve just never made a record like this, so I didn’t really know.
Q: Did something happen that made you want to pull back?
A: It’s a funny thing. You finally find your family, and you find this peace, and you want to celebrate it, and it comes out in your songs naturally, and all the hardship you’ve been through. And when it gets discussed outside of the concert hall, it starts to feel kind of dirty.
Q: It’s a perfect storm. You’re getting more popular, and people want to know more about you, coinciding with you making a personal album.
A: I’m fine with people knowing more about me. It’s fine, I can handle it. But when it starts to affect those you love, it’s very tough.
Q: Is it affecting how you might write in the future?
A: No, I’m on a trajectory toward — I want what I write to be as useful to as many people as possible. What I appreciate as I get older is a very distilled, honest and more plain-spoken style of writing, which is quite different from the way I was writing 10 years ago.
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Q: There’s an interesting song on the new album where you talk about semantics being like a noose.
A: Yeah. I used to regard words as being tricky, because words are inherently the opportunity for being disingenuous, or not quite meaning what you say, whereas melody is melody. I used to think of words as being deceptive, so on a song like the title track, (it’s) very self-conscious or self-aware, talking about how I think of my own identity as a songwriter. Am I a confessional songwriter? I didn’t think I was, but life got so real, it just started happening.
Q: Was there a moment when you thought, “This is not what people expect from me. They expect esoterics and a little bit of remove”?
A: It still gets filtered through my brain, but when I do have those feelings about my audience, a sense of, Oh man, can they handle this, then I have to do it. It’s already too late.
Q: Was it hard to get Fiona Apple to do a duet?
A: She doesn’t say yes to a lot of things. She’s about the most uncompromising artist I know. It took a little coaxing, but I sent her the song and she liked it. But to finally get her to come in and do it, I can’t say was effortless.
Q: You’re so much more prolific than she is, she never puts out albums. Didn’t you want to say to her, “What are you doing? You’re wasting your life”?
A: You know, we talked about this when we were having dinner, and (my producer) asked her, “What are you working on? And she said “Nothing,” and it seemed kind of refreshing, actually. Of course, right now she’s intensely working on something. Everything she puts out, it packs a punch. Personally, I need to keep moving. I worry that the different parts of me will wither if I don’t put out a new side project, or something.
Q: You moved from Chicago to New York, and then to LA.
A: I was living out of a suitcase when I moved to New York, it was not very ceremonious. But that’s kind of where we started this new adventure of having a family. LA is really the first time there’s a sense of permanence, after being transient for 20 years. That’s something.
Q: Can you come back to Chicago and appreciate it, or are you not ready yet?
A: There was a time when I left, when it was a mixture of guilt — which seems silly now, people have to be able to live where they want without feeling some sense of responsibility — and (the 2013 EP) “I Want to See Pulaski at Night” was a salve for my guilt about leaving Chicago. Now I can go back and say, “What’s wrong with this? This is a great city.” But I was there for 36 years. It starts to accumulate a lot of heaviness and emotional baggage. I had to go for my own sanity.
Allison Stewart is a freelancer.
Twitter @chitribent
When: 7 p.m. Sept. 7
Where: Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Randolph Street and Michigan Avenue
Tickets: $22.50-$57.50; 312-742-1168 or www.Etix.com
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