Andrew Bird brings his one-man pop symphony to the Ann Arbor Summer Festival

Andrew Bird publicity photo

The audience at the Power Center last night thanked Chicago-based musician Andrew Bird with a standing ovation at the end of his multi-instrumental solo performance—the first main-stage show of this year’s annual Ann Arbor Summer Festival, which continues through July 10.

If you did not already know Bird performs as a one-man-band, you would listen to his songs and think he had a full set of musicians behind him. However, aside from a few duets and trios with country-folk singer-songwriter Haley Bonar and her guitarist Jeremy Ylvisaker last night, all of the instrumentals and vocals during Bird’s set were coming from him.

Bird’s music, which has been described as “chamber pop,” is a meld of his classical training as a violinist and the various musical influences he has picked up such as jazz, rock n’ roll, and world music. He layers violin, guitar, glockenspiel, vocals, and a lot of whistling to create a symphony of sounds, looping and arranging the parts live on-stage.

There is something subtly spectacular about the way Bird performs his live shows. The visual presentation of his various instruments on stage shares both a physical and poetic resemblance to an old-time organ grinder show. At the center of his setup, his double XL horn was captivating in itself as it spun around. And a monkey doll sitting on the horn drove the comparison home.

Bogdan Popa, a graduate student in Ann Arbor, was impressed by Bird’s one-man show. “I like that he had this idea to use all of these different instruments and have all of these sounds going at the same time,” he said. The way he loops and layers passages in his songs gave Popa “a sense that he was really in his own mind” during the performance, and he found it to be quite a feat to “put all of these things together in his mind” live, he said after the show.

Bird’s Ann Arbor Summer Festival set was predominantly new songs. Some might make it onto his next album, but he has not yet said when he plans to release it. A number of his newer songs have been filmed at previous shows and shared online; however, Bird is continually changing and developing his music. What ends up on his albums will likely differ from the way he performed them at the Power Center.

The crowd got a good dose of his latest. He played “Breeding Desperation,” a song about “depopulation” in bees colonies, he said at the show. He also performed new songs “Hole in the Ocean,” “The Lusitania” and “Orpheo Looks Back” among others at the Power Center.

Aside from being a talented musician and songwriter, Bird is quite the charmer when it comes to stage banter. He gave the crowd plenty of absurd-sounding-but-probably-true stories about some of his previously released songs.

According to Bird, his song “Why?” reminds him of how “jocks” used to pick on his college roommate and once lit their door on fire. After such incidents, “I thought, why’d you do that?” Bird said, greeted with laughter from the audience. He said he came up with “Headsoak” 12 years ago after spending time at “a hotel in Chicago with retired Jesuit priests and nuns.” He saw them at the pool “bobbing up and down to gospel on the radio.”

Bird also performed other previously released songs that are popular with his fans, including “Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left,” “Natural Disasters,” and “Spare-Ohs.”

Ann Arbor-born Eric Burnstein said he “thought the show was good,” and that Bird’s new material “is going to be good.” However, “I thought he maybe experimented with too much in one show. A lot of new numbers is cool, but I could have done with a few more that I knew already,” he said after the show.

Haley Bonar and Jeremy Yivisaker joined Bird on stage for a few songs, including a rendition of Delta blues legend Charlie Patton’s “I’m Goin’ Home” during the encore. They warmed up the crowd at the start of the show, along with band mates Jacob Hanson, Luke Anderson, and Mike Lewis. Theirs was a solid set of country-folk pop tunes, which included a song that Bonar, who announced she was five-and-a-half months pregnant, dedicated to her unborn daughter titled “Wendy Bird.”

Read more about Andrew Bird in annarbor.com’s recent preview of the event.