CD Review

Andrew Bird
The Mysterious Production of Eggs
Righteous Babe Records
2005
www.andrewbird.net
A few months ago, I read a good review of Andrew Bird’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs in Magnet magazine. Several days afterward, I’m in the local Borders, and I notice they have the album on one of those listening stations. I put on the headphones, hit the Play button, and I’m shocked. It’s really lame, boring, 80s-style arena rock. Blecch....OK, so I had hit the wrong button. Fine. But, as it turns out, the button I want to hit is broken and doesn’t work. So I go home and go to Bird’s Web site and find samples of all the songs there. (Explain to me again why there is any point in leaving the house?) I like what I hear so I log onto CD Universe and order the album. It arrives, I rip it to MP3, copy it to my iPod, and it becomes car music for a few short- and long-range errands and while it doesn’t immediately grab me, after a few cycles I begin to really get into it. Andrew Bird, by the way, is a multinstrumentalist known primarily for violin and whistling (he actually won awards for his whistling, which wasn’t something I knew you could win awards for) and was distinguished by being a member of a band called the Squirrel Nut Zippers which flirted with popularity in 1996-1997 with a track called “Hell” during that brief faux-big band revival (I have that album and they had like 500 members, so the chances are pretty good that any given musician was at one time a member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers). The Mysterious Production of Eggs is hard to describe musically; take a bunch of styles from country to folk to bluegrass to classical to rock and throw them in a blender and you’ve pretty much got the album. Still, I find most of it to be hauntingly beautiful--and the lyrics tend to be more on the surreal side and also tend to be hauntingly beautiful. “My dewy-eyed Disney bride/What has tried/Swapping your blood with formaldehyde?/Monsters?” sings Bird in “Fake Palindromes.” “Stretched out on the tarmac/Six miles south of North Platte/He can’t stand to look back/At sixteen tons of HAZMAT,” he sings in “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left.” “Today was s’posed to be the day/Molecules decide to change their form/The laws of physics lose their sway” he sings in “Opposite Day,” just after expressing concern that he’d become a cephalopod, a reference that always scores big points with me. It’s certainly the oddest album I’ve listened to in a while, and I mean that in the nicest possible way because it’s one of the most satisfying. Oh, and once again, great CD booklet graphics. And, hey, the whistling is award-winning.