Hark!

Description

Andrew Bird delivers the brand new holiday album Hark! Building upon last years EP of the same name, the 13-song set delivers freshly recorded originals including Christmas in April, perhaps the first COVID-inspired holiday song, which Andrew wrote during lockdown (when will we know/if we can meet under the mistletoe?) plus holiday classics and wintertime re-imaginings of seasonally ambiguous deep cuts by John Cale, John Prine and Handsome Family. For the first time since 2002s Ballad of the Red Shoes, Bird collaborated on the album artwork with his mother, who was also the inspiration for Hark!s exquisite, solo violin arrangement of Mille Cherubini in Coro her favorite piece from the Pavarotti and Vienna Boys Choir performance she and Andrew would always listen to when he was a child.

Lets not talk about the dubious motives that might lead an artist to make a holiday record, Bird says. Its a complicated relationship many of us have with the holidays and the requisite music we hear. So lets admit that its a utilitarian thing. The music is just one contributing factor to our communal or solitary joy and melancholy. As a musician, its an excuse to take a break from writing the next record and indulge in an unapologetically nostalgic exercise. Ive done my best to find some lesser known gems. A passing reference to wintertime sentiment is all it takes to make the cut on Hark! A mention of snow falling in John Cales Andalucia, a namecheck of Christmas in John Prines Souvenirs or as the setting of the drunken fiasco in the Handsome Familys So Much Wine, remade as Greenwine.

Theres an original tune I wrote in April during the most disorienting phase of the pandemic, when I couldnt help but wonder where well be when the holidays come, if we could be together or not, he adds. Ive been writing a lot of songs inspired by this uninspiring predicament. Lets hope they all become obsolete as soon as possible. Anyway, I hope you enjoy Hark! And that it underscores better times.