Some musicians are on a different level of consciousness, which becomes obvious during a live performance; such is the case for indie virtuoso Andrew Bird.
While Bird is a master of the violin — which you’ll often hear accompany his tremolo whistling — his insatiable appetite for other instruments keeps the live set an endless buffet of variety. In concert, he interchangeably works with the guitar and glockenspiel; he will likewise loop his whistling, and his strumming, plucking, and fiddling of the violin in a dizzying, cyclical fashion.
The Chicago native self-released his first solo record, Music of Hair in 1996, the same year he graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in violin performance.

Soon after, he served as bandleader for Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire, an outfit that put out three albums around the turn of the century. Though a brief run, Bowl of Fire was imperative for Bird; it established his broad palate, from the New Orleans Zydeco howling of “Minor Stab” on 1997’s Thrills, to the more luxuriated baroque-pop (“11:11”) or prototypical indie-rock tracks (“Two Way Action”) on 2001’s The Swimming Hour. Bird has an array of talent, no doubt, but his penchant for the violin inebriates every track.
But beyond an impeccable multi-instrumentalist, Bird is a lyricist with a reverence for his language. On 2005’s existential Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs, Bird is baffled with the conception of life (the album was inspired while he lived on a chicken farm, where he would retrieve and cook their eggs every morning) and he includes haunting lines like “You’re what happens when two substances collide / And by all accounts, you really should have died.”
Eggs was followed with a string of excellent studio albums — 2007’s Armchair Apocrypha, 2009’s Noble Beast, and 2015’s Echolocations: Canyon, an experiment in acoustics, which Bird recorded entirely inside Utah’s Coyote Gulch canyons.
He’s also made cameos for other bands (My Morning Jacket’s album Z, Thao With the Get Down Stay Down’s Know Better Learn Faster), written for both TV and movies (he scored 2011’s Norman and offered his whistling for an affecting solo in The Muppets film the same year).
Bird’s newest album, Are You Serious, which was released this year at the beginning of April, finds Bird at his most authoritative and domineering. Now 42, Bird is still exorcising his tender uncertainty with minutiae of the human condition. The opener “Capsized” paints a picture of a deplorable soul, drunk with pity after a break-up; “Spoon dirty laundry, darling, you’re all alone,” Bird commiserates. On “Valleys of the Young,” he asks if “we should commit treason and bring into this world a son” and leave behind the “valleys of brunch and tedium.”
But to see Bird at his finest, catch him at the Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall tomorrow, Wednesday May 18. Tickets start at $32.50. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show begins at 8. The incomparable John “GMF” Grant will open. For more information on tickets, visit the Portland’5 website.