From the first drop of water, to the raging Niagara...

It would be incorrect to say that I've had a love-hate relationship with Andrew Bird, even ignoring the (alleged) irrationality of claiming to have a relationship with someone I don't know. Really, it's been a lot more of a care-not care relationship.

Ben first introduced me to Andrew Bird around the summer before my junior year, beginning with The Swimming Hour, which I to date still look upon with great fondness. How did I develop this fondness, you ask? By indulging in orgiastic listening excess the likes of which would make Alex from A Clockwork Orange blush.

To give us a little context, I was coming out of a long, dark infatuation with 70's progressive rock. My favorite song at the time was "Supper's Ready," a 23-minute long epic about the journey of a middle-class Englishman through the apocalypse, looking for his wife. If that sounds a little outlandish, a) it is and b) you should check out some of the other shit I was listening to at the time. This is not to say I regret this period of my life (not that much, anyways)--I'm still a proud (not really) owner of most of that progressive rock from freshman and sophomore year.

I was entranced with Yes's syncopated melodies, Peter Gabriel's (in retrospect, generally very dumb) lyrics and (genuinely good) vocals, and King Crimson's atmosphere and experimentation. After a while, though, the combination of how exasperating that music is in the first place, along with the fact that most of those bands changed drastically to stay alive after brief peaks (generally around 1973) that the advent of punk killed off, left me wanting something else.

Which brings us to Andrew Bird. I stole a ton of music from Ben, usually not in albums but in brief snippets of songs I especially liked (I still tend to listen to albums from the singles outward). Andrew Bird's stuff was far and away the best of this music, especially The Swimming Hour, which Bird himself calls his "jukebox album"; there's not a ton of continuity, but just about every song is excellent. Coming off of layered and occasionally lifeless progressive rock, listening to "Two Way Action" for the first time was like the first time I went colon rollin', a magical time in any young man's life.

Sure enough, I annihilated that album, I just would not listen to anything else. Same thing with The Mysterious Production of Eggs, same thing with Sufjan Stevens' Illinois. It wouldn't be Swimming Hour day or a Sufjan day, I only operated in terms of months. It was a full-on addiction, and I so fully saturated myself that until recently I was almost totally unable to listen to those albums at all (I still can't listen to Illinois outside of summertime).

Unlike Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird isn't an indie rock deadbeat dad; he's there for his fans. Armchair Apocrypha was a hit with the critics, combining the catchy melodies of Eggs with the noodling atmospheres of Weather Systems (never one of my favorites). Plus, guitars! I sort of begrudgingly engorged myself with AA, but it never (outside of one moment in "Dark Matter," still one of my favorite Bird songs) really seized upon me like the last few albums had. I had become so inured to Bird's sound that I could only really enjoy the immediately catchy songs ("Heretics," "Plasticities"), the magic of which wore off on me so much more quickly than had his older pop songs. Instead of defaulting to a very deep emotional connection with the music, I'd have to concentrate just to keep my mind from wandering.

I felt the same thing with Noble Beast, this year's Bird album. Again, perfectly acceptable songs, but another case of been there done that, regardless of the obvious innovations in Bird's style. It really did seem like it was too late for Bird (not to mention Sufjan Stevens).

That is, until Bird and company opened with a heartfelt, groin-grabbingly loud rendition of "Fiery Crash" last night at WorkPlay. Between his banter (he really is a very funny guy), his explanation of the stories behind songs, and his improvisation, he framed in vitally new ways songs I had thought were hopeless cases. I don't know if it was a subconscious need to understand Bird's personality itself, or the magic of the concert experience in general (hint: this is not the correct answer), or if the whole thing was just unwittingly well-timed, but now I can go back through Bird's catalog and experience something like that first revelatory moment listening to "Two Way Action" in Ben's room. It was a magic, however trite that may sound, that I never thought I'd recover.

Despite a number of terrible factors (standing; the turrible drunk grown-ass man who would not stop shout-talking behind me; a ton of jamming) I had, in addition to a lot of fun, something of a revelatory experience. I got to reclaim something I had thought was irreparably lost to me. Probably worth 30 dollars, right?

Sufjan Stevens is still dead to me.