Matt’s Blog

One of the albums that I find myself listening to over and over again this year is Andrew Bird’s Armchair Apocrypha, so when Shaun told me he would be making a stop here I was excited to go and see him live.

Andrew walked out onto the stage with a stuffed toy monkey in tow and got right to work. I knew I was going to enjoy the show when I realized that he’d be using loops and repeaters to create the songs live. I’m not sure why I enjoy this so much, but I find it amazing to hear how each layer is added on top of one another to create the final sounds. I guess with band you only hear the “finished” product and never get to hear all the layers as individual pieces. For the first 2/3’s of the show it was only Andrew on stage building the songs piece by piece before he was joined by his friend Jeremy who lent his guitar skills to the show.

While I enjoyed the show and thought it was good, I didn’t think it was great. After a while I felt like all the songs started to blend together and almost sounded like one big song. I was also disappointed that he only played a couple of songs from Armchair Apocrypha as that’s my favorite album of his. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I was really prepping myself to be blown away and I just wasn’t. I would say that anyone how enjoys his music should go and see him live to get a better appreciation of the talent that he has. Lets not forget about his whistling skills either……I kept waiting for him to bust out “Patience.” Maybe next time!

Rest of my pictures are here.