“I guess we’re gonna be best friends now,” Andrew Bird deadpans, peering over his sunglasses like a violin-wielding noir detective. He and Ben Sollee are politely stuck in the same interview, feeling each other out like two introverts. “We’ve run into each other,” Bird shrugs. “But we don’t really know each other yet. Maybe this is the chance.”
Don’t worry, it gets more existential from there. Because when you put two classically trained, genre-hopping, loop-pedaling singer-songwriters in the same room, they don’t talk about hit singles or big choruses — they talk about the burden of repetition. “I grew up with classical music,” Bird says. “I found pop music repetitive and dull.” He says it like he’s confessing to a minor crime. “But I’ve since come to appreciate the format. It’s incredibly challenging. These three-and-a-half-minute songs are like the Twitter of songwriting.”
Sollee nods along like a man who’s been trying to beat Twitter with a cello for the past decade. “Jamming out is part of the story,” he says, because jamming out is the only way he knows how to keep the story alive. “Having stuff in your live set you don’t know how it’s gonna go — that creates a story on stage. I love to watch someone struggle. It’s interesting to see someone take a risk and stumble, then pull it back together.”
Bird agrees. “I’d rather watch somebody go through something. There’s a good chance it won’t work — that’s the point.”
The conversation drifts to economics. Sollee points out that young bands are basically classical chamber groups now — forced to do more with less, each member juggling two or three roles like a budget multi-tool. “It’s like post-war classical,” he says. “You’d get a French horn, a cello, and a voice because that’s who was still in town.”
And loops — loops are the secret glue. Bird calls them “a whole other instrument. It’s not just replicating yourself, it’s improvising with your former self.” Sometimes, they even rescue the studio versions that don’t age well. “I’ve got a song on my last record,” Bird admits, “where now all these new hooks have popped up live. They weren’t there before.”
Sollee knows the feeling. “If you could remarry someone five years later, you’d probably do the ceremony differently,” he says. “Same with songs.”
And what about the lyrics? “People ask, ‘What’s this song about?’” Bird laughs. “It’s about hitting absolute zero. Playing so many shows you think you’ve emptied yourself completely.” The moral: if you want Andrew Bird to write a song about you, be prepared to become a quantum physics thought experiment.
Meanwhile, Sollee just tries to get as personal as possible without slipping into the trap of performative confessionals. “If I try to think of something that’ll relate to a lot of people, it comes off impersonal. If I’m super personal, it connects.”
And what refills the tank after all that output? For Sollee, it’s the bicycle. “Recalibrates my brain,” he says, as if a 45-mile ride to the gig is normal rock-star behavior. “You get there, you’re physically empty, and you have the best show ever.”
So here they are: two genre-smashing musical tinkerers, looping themselves into the void and hoping something new comes out the other side.
Watch the interview above and check out the videos below.
—
