Andrew Bird
Inside Problems
LOMA VISTA
As a professional whistler and violin virtuoso, Andrew Bird is very much a musician’s musician. Coupled with some unashamedly abstruse lyrics, it means he’s often painted as serious and inaccessible. Yet if you examine the totality of his songs, there’s a playful humor—however dark, however recondite, however obscure—lying in wait beneath the surface. Even though he deals with modern life and the damaging effects it has on our physical, mental, and emotional health on Inside Problems (Bird’s 13th solo studio album if you don’t count Hark!, 2020’s collection of holiday songs), that same levity is present on its 11 tracks.
“Underlands” is the perfect opener, then. A song that focuses on the mysterious stuff that lies beneath the surface of, well, everything, it begins with a jazzy cadence before Bird’s existential pontificating takes it in an almost They Might Be Giants–esque direction. If you could hear the inside of the 48-year-old’s head, this would probably be a good approximation of what it might sound like—both chaotic and laidback, thoughts speeding up and slowing down as strings kick in to invoke widescreen scores from a parallel past, before it devolves into some whimsical humming mixed with very mellow scat-singing.
From there on, Inside Problems is a delirious journey into a world that’s both recognizable and exaggerated, half-real and half-fictional. “Lone Didion” is a tense, quirky, and affecting retelling of a story Bird once heard about the late American writer returning alone to a restaurant she frequented with her husband the same year both he and their daughter died. It’s heavy, but in Bird’s respectful hands, it’s a beautiful tribute that caters to the bright parts of existence as much as it does the void of loss.
On the title track, however, Bird looks more inward, imagining the lessons of life as a series of molting processes. Interestingly, for a musician who’s always seemed to be the antithesis of primal rock ’n’ roll, “The Night Before Your Birthday” sounds very much a Velvet Underground song (or at least Bird’s version of one), while “Atomized”—another Didion-inspired track—has some oddly quasi-tropical rhythms flowing through it. Although a single, it’s one of the album’s weaker songs, probably because it’s almost too playful for its own good.
He gets the balance right on the jaunty “Faithless Ghost” and closer “Never Fall Apart,” the latter of which blends Velvets-y delivery with Ben E. King–style arrangements. That, in fact, is the crux: Despite some marvelous moments, Inside Problems never quite feels like an Andrew Bird album. He’s certainly present here, as is his distinctive talent, but he feels somewhat diluted. Still, a diluted Andrew Bird is a level most artists can only aspire to achieve.
