Andrew Bird + Jimbo Mathus

Published Apr 13, 2021, 9:00 AM

Listening to Jimbo Mathus and Andrew Bird’s new album, These 13, is like taking a trip down South … a century ago. It’s new territory for Andrew Bird, a classically trained multi-instrumentalist from the Chicago suburbs who’s been a successful indie folk singer/songwriter and also recently acted on the fourth season of Fargo. But for Jimbo, as a Mississippi resident, some of this music can hit too close to home. Surrounded by the ghosts and old battlefields of the Civil War, some songs he finds almost too hard to sing. In 2018 Andrew and Jimbo started exchanging voice memos and new song ideas. Over the course of two years they recorded their new album the really old fashioned way—live to tape, singing into a single microphone.

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Pushkin listening to Jimbo math this and Andrew Bird's new album These Thirteen. It's like taking a trip down South a century ago. Forgot to Get Oh, forgot to get Oh, got to get getting on Toome, forgot to get open Ontome, Forgot to Get. It's new territory. For Andrew Bird, it classically trained multi instrumentalists from the Chicago suburbs, who's been a successful indie folk singer songwriter and also recently acted on the fourth season A Farm Now. But for Jimbo, as a Mississippi resident, some of the music can hit too close down, surrounded by the ghosts in old battlefields of the Civil War. Some songs he finds almost two artists, Jimbo and Andrew first met musically playing for the sprol Nut Zippers in the mid nineties, a key part of the swing revival of the time. In twenty eighteen, Andrew and Jimbo got back together, exchanging voice memos and new song ideas. Over the course of two years, they recorded their new album The Old Fashioned Way, singing into a single microphone. In this episode, Bruce had them talks to Jimbo and Andrew about the varying ways they came to master their instruments, and now hanging out with Jimbo down South freed Andrew from the constraints this formal training. They also talk about how they managed to sneak a line about cell phones onto an album that pulls its inspiration from one hundred and fifty years ago. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmonds. Here's Bruce Head them with Andrew Bird and Jimbo matthis. You've got the terrific new album these thirteen. So let's just talk about how this album came about, what was the genesis of it. I've always wanted to make this record for the last twenty some years. You know, Jimbo and I worked a lot together in the late nineties, and I always just wanted to get him alone with me to do a stripped down duo record because he's he just has something in his playing and his singing, in his musicality that brings something out in me. For one, and it's also I just feel like people need to hear it. It's kind of a lost touch that he has with phrasing, and that's that's kind of been ironed out of music since the advent of radio in the music industry. But I just haven't really, you know, had the right moment to bring him out here and to do this this project. So it took me quite a while to get around to it. But once we did, we you know what surprised me is how much writing we did together, what a collaboration it was. I thought it was just going to be us doing a bunch of Mississippi Sheiks covers and Charlie Patton covers, and it turned into a big writing collaboration, which is kind of a revelation. Yeah, I mean, bird Bird he kind of sketched out the idea to me, but he was like, you know, do you have a couple of songs maybe you could send me. So, I mean I ended up sending them probably twenty songs or something, I mean, just because I like to just throw ideas out, you know, And so it kind of started taking more shape that way, like like he described, and became a much more a personal and original record. I think that neither one of us envisioned at the time how much we enjoyed it and how easily we were able to cobble these songs together and of course, I knew playing would be no problem and record and we've always had that. Now, when you guys were playing in the nineties, you were doing swing, Andrew, how did you know this was something you wanted to do with Jimbo? Were you backstage one night and he started playing a song and you thought, that's the sound I want. Yeah, when we met, you know, I met I was aware of the school the Zippers in their first record, and I met him in North Carolina when I was at a festival there. We were both into this early twentieth century American music, and for the Zippers there was just this convergence of a strange national trend popular trend with that that they were on the same path of. But there was way more going on there than just pop culture thing, because I really think of the Zippers is not so much a swing band as like one of the many eccentric Southern bands like say the B fifty twos or you know. I think of him more and like a broader than just that era of swing dance lessons and Martiniz and whatever. I mean. Jimbo would invite me down down to North Carolina and down to New Orleans and was introducing me to all these eccentric folks and playing music all the time and kind of hard living and wild life. But when when he brought me down to New Orleans to do songs for Rosetta, which is his tribute record to Charlie Patton and to his daughter Rosetta, then that's that's when I got really turned down to Charlie Patton, which is Jimbo's sort of personal touchdowne I guess creatively, and it was it was less of a swing thing and more of this sort of strange, exotic Southern music from the early twentieth century. And that's where really the idea for this record started, was that I just wanted to sort of showcase show people what Jimbo was doing that maybe in other projects of his. You don't quite here is clearly like Andrew said, um, I came from a real rural area with a lot of family music, so the whole folk music thing. It's just odd that we met over the era when he was both interested in the early jazz, vaudeville cabaret and so was I. Incredibly, we haven't neither one of us has done that particular style since then, but in our meetings and our hangouts back in the nineties when he would come to North Carolina. You know, we would do like I did growing up, which was set out under the tree and just share songs, you know, from the folk cannon and Jimbo. You're your parents started you out on mandolin, is that right? I started out on mandolin, you know when. And the way I grew up with music is very untrained. I played by ear like Andrew, but coming from a different site. It was just social music. There was no microphones or stages or anything or audience. It would just be the family and the friends, you know. That's the way I grew up, so it'd be a lot of drinking, you know, not me when I was six, but one of my uncles got a little kneebred and left his mandolin over at the house, you know, and I guess maybe for a few months he forgot where he had left, and by the time he came back to pick it up, I had learned the rudiments and was figuring out I wanted to play with the with the older guys and gals, and so at that point they had to buy me and mandolin. But your parents weren't musicians, right, it was just a tradition in your family. Yeah. They weren't professional musicians, no, not at all, but they were quite good and really just the social reality of music and just doing it for your own entertainment, your own enjoyment. It's like a pre TV lifestyle, something to pass the time. Of course, you do play funerals and family reunions, important milestones, you know, we would that's where we would perform, and that's where we would set up camp, and hours and hours and hours of music would pass, and sometimes days, you know, of just playing music, singing music, socializing and learning these songs and sharing the cannon. So I probably knew a couple of hundred songs by the time I was twelve years old, you know, just the roots. Now, Andrew, you come at this music from a completely different direction. You were classically trained. I think it went to the conservatory at Northwestern. Yeah, I mean I grew up on the north shore of Chicago and did the suzuki thing from early early age, which is sort of a prefab oral tradition if you think about it. It's it's a method, you know, by this Japanese doctor to teach children at a young age to learn music the way they learned as their learning language. So you're learning you know, Mozart Buck but also go Talent Roady and you know folk songs. And so I didn't learn to read music until high school and it was a bit trial by fire. And by that time my ear was so big I could learn faster by ear, And yeah, I was. I went through conservatory. That was, you know, I was always kind of bucking against the tradition and it was it was social. But it wasn't until I started going to like Irish music sessions on Sundays when I was in college and drinking a Guinness and everyone's sharing tunes where you know, if someone would start a tune and by the time then a third or fourth time it goes around, you've tried figure out the nooks and crannies of that melody. So that was, you know, remarkable, very much more of a relaxed social type of context like Jumbo's talking about, compared to like during the weeks being in an orchestra. You know what interested me listening though, is your tone on the violin. Because it's one thing to learn the notes, but you have a you have a very different tone playing this kind of music than you often do in your own music. It has a more country kind of flavor. I you know, remember when I was a kid seeing you know, your hoodie Manuin and eat Zoc Peerlman trying to do jazz. It wasn't all that successful. No offense to you, hoodie menu and he really didn't have the gypsy soul. No. No, what's it like to have the kind of classical chops you do and then say, Okay, now I got to play this other kind of music and maybe some of the things you relied on in classical music don't necessarily translate. Yeah. I mean from an early age, I would like listen to something on the radio and I would try to play it because that was how the Suzuki thing worked, you know. It was like a one room schoolhouse, you know, just learn the repertoire by year. But that age of like from eighteen to twenty two, I was just ravenous for new kinds of music to learn, and it did. I did have to. Playing with drummers did help me kind of break up the phrase and be my own drummer and playing the Irish music. You have to play your own backbeat with the way you're boeing, and it's a feel thing. It's not like Uhoti Minumen trying to play jazz. That's like a transcription of maybe a Grappelli solo or something that he might be playing, and it's just you know, you tried. I tried to do that first. I got a book of like transcriptions of Stephen Grappelli solos, and I was trying to read it, and of course doesn't make any sense musically, and it can't be really taught that way. It's just an intuitive feel thing. And it took a couple of years to kind of unlearn some things or break down the way I bode, mostly because it's mostly in the right hand. Now, I think I played more like a tenor saxophone player than a violinist. You know, there's a lot less articulation. I think where a lot of classical players revealed their stripes is in articulate. They're over articulating everything, and it's just painful to listen to. Sometimes. We'll be right back with more from Andrew Bird and Jimbo Matthis after a quick break. We're back with more from Andrew Bird and Jimbo Matthis. When I was listening through the album this week, I was trying to imagine if I were to say to people, you love this album, if you liked and I think in the first few minutes it was like, if you like the Stanley Brothers or Willie Nelson or Steph Smith, their son House or Johnny Cash or Ricky Skeggs or Django Reinhardt or Clarence Ashley the band. And it just went on and on and on from there. So it's not I don't want to give people the idea that this is some antique style. It's basically kind of American music in a very broad sense. But did you have particular people in mind when you were doing this, or did you have a particular sound in mind when you were recording this. There's definitely no conscious template that we've set out to achieve, you know, or some recreation of anyone else. And my influences are so myriad. A lot of the people you just mentioned, of course play into that. But you know, the way I think about it's like the old Harry Smith, you know the Smithsonian collection. You know of folk music, how it goes from everything from Cajun to African American music to songs that are practical to like build a railroad to or you know, those are more than the bed rock templates that I use. Um not necessarily copying an artists, no never, but in the tradition, in the vein of a style of music, a region of music, it's not a reading of any antique forms or that's just who we are as people, and that that's true when you you listen to the Even when we were working in the early jazz vein, it was still original songs and original ideas, and some of which wouldn't have made sense in that era. We weren't like, you know, we weren't going around wearing vintage clothes thinking, God, I wish it was nineteen thirty two. You know. But uh, what surprised me when with the writing of this record is like, because we both usually work alone on our songs, and we kind of tapped into a little bit of what clarity and efficiency of like songwriting teams. You know, where Jimbo would throw out something like dig up the hatchet, you know where he's talking taking some like somewhat familiar expression. You know, he was we have the expression bury the hatchet, and he's like, let's dig it up, like, let's have a real knockdown, drag out fight, just because it maybe is an aphrodisiac or whatever. I don't know what he's thinking, but I take the I take that idea in and kind of run with it. And because I see exactly what he's doing. If it was in my one of my own songs, I would be have this obtuse internal conversation. But when it's two people immediately externalizing their ideas and there's a kind of a nice, clear, bouncy conversation going on with the lyrics, and that's it came together so quickly and gratifyingly compared to the internal torture that we go through to write our own song. Sometimes. You know, you know, that might be my favorite song the album. I think it's my favorite lyrics on the album. I was going to ask you, did you get that from anywhere? Dig up the hatchet, because now that I look at it, it's one of those that seems so obvious. I write from titles. You know, I get the title first, and so if I have a good title that I think is somehow intriguing, it almost spells out what the song can be about. So I don't have to sit around and dig up some idea or emotion or something to create a song. Because I start from the title. My mind kind of likes to flip things over like that, and especially colloquialism's regional dialect, things people say but don't think about it, you know. So it's like, yeah, why didn't somebody think of that? Well, I mean, that's could be true of any great song, you know, but that one is particularly cool in the language that it flips on its ear. But I had the title dig Up the Hatchet laying around in the notebook for probably I don't know, maybe fifteen years really, But I have to ask you, do you remember thinking of the phrase? Yeah, of course I do. Do you remember where you were? I was in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and my grandmother's driveway, you know, you know, it made me chuckle, So I knew, I knew there was something there. I just and so. As Andrew and I progressed in our writing, I realized, well, shit, I can just go back and just dig up some old song titles and I might have a scrap of a napkin or something that had I think that was the fewest lines of anything I seen him, but he you know, I had two or three lines. You did have that that bit of the bridge where it's the cell phone thing mentioned in pictures you uh, you found on my phone, which I raised an eyebrow at at first because I thought that that seems that seems almost too current. But I like it now. I think it's we needed some of that. The other line I wanted to ask you about because you know, with songs, even with modern songs, people you know, people like older technology. People want to write about trains and cadillacts. I think actually Rick Rubin had this conversation with Jack White on our podcast because Jack White was trying to figure out how to put tesla in a song, and he's like, it just doesn't work. But somehow in that song, the it's the line about those photos you found on my phone, it works. It maybe the first example of like new technology and an old song. I thought it was so great. You know, It's just I was just thinking, well, what are the things that cost the most conflict? Cell Phones causing more problems with people. You know, it's like the biggest contributor to you know, arguing and things like that. And yeah, so it seems like the most obvious thing that somebody would would bring up when you're digging out the hatchet, you know, And I thought Bird might just take the line out. But I mean I didn't have but a couple of lines. I thought about for a minute. I don't know that kind of stuff. Like, you know, before you had the Lone Gun songwriter singer songwriter, the Dylan's, the Joni Mitchell's, there were songwriting teams, and there's a certain division of labor and the sort of conversation that is kind of appealing. Yeah, you can make a simpler song that way. Actually, you can boil it down to the to the to the bone because you're not stepping on each other's toes. You know, it's a clean line. You cover a lot of you know, psychological territory. The lyrics start in LA, which is that where you did the writing. That's where I was located, and Jimbo was in North Mississippi, but he he started writing that song in LA based on his observations as someone not from there, seeing just how shocking the homelessness was in such a prosperous tourist destination spot as such as downtown Hollywood and then I he pretty much had that song fully written and recorded before, but I heard that line look down and see the stars, look up and see the gold, and I thought, that is, like, that's that line as gold. It's that's like your John Prine, like it contains multitudes in a few words. So I grabbed onto that and that was Yeah, that kind of sets the stage for the whole record in the sense that here's Jimbo, you know, coming from his environment as a songwriter and observer, and this is what he sees. And then I wrote a verse that says what I see, which is as someone who lives in basically in this neighborhood and drives my kid to school through it, you know every day, the people that live there that are are seeing it and trying to keep their humanity and when they see such in humanity, you know, and not be numb to it. And so that was the flip side that I was trying to offer to the song. It was a great flip side, you know, just don't you know, if you look away and you close the blinds, then even though you can't maybe change what's you see, but if you look away and ignore it, then you are doing a disservice to your fellow man, you know, and then if you look away, you won't see an avenue of help. You know, you won't see an avenue too when it opens up to you or it appears to you to actually make a difference. So it was a beautiful verse there that he wrote. We'll be back with more from Jimbo Mathis and Andrew Bird. After a quick break, We're back with Andrew Bird and Jimbo Mathis. A lot of the lyrics I found very direct, very vulnerable, certainly, Andrew maybe more direct and vulnerable than you're used to writing. Was that all a product of working with someone else? Yeah, I think, like I was saying, like in my own internal conversations that become my songs cannot often be a long drawn out process. The ones I write fastest are the most direct, but the ones that take years to write are very layered and psychologically complex, and working with Jimbo was kept things more closer to the surface. I guess you could say, I want to ask you a little bit about a couple of the songs Sweet Oblivion. How did that come about? There's a couple of songs that were all all Jimbo or all me and like beat Still my Heart was all Jimbo and Sweet Oblivion was something I had already written before that I just thought made sense for the two of us to play. I tried to make it for my finest work yet, and it didn't come out quite right. I think. The thing the good thing about that when was I was able to put that North Mississippi Hill Country guitar in there. I mean, that was a real, you know, something that really worked with that. Yeah, Jimbo's touched on the guitar. Is allows very simple things to be remarkable as opposed to just kind of simple or boring. You know. Can you tell me a bit what you meant by that by that guitar style. Uh, It's just one great thing about the Deep South still to this today, there's regions of styles of music that have been haven't been a race or or ironed out, as Andrew said earlier. So there's a little pocket of African American blues music on that's bass in North mississ Northeast Mississippi, in the hill country up there, they call it, and it's it's usually would be they didn't have a lot of instruments, so it would be a solo guitar piece, but it's very rhythmic and it's mostly on the bass notes. There's not a lot of treble and really in any of my guitar playing, but it's a rhythmic drive of a way to approach a guitar, and it comes from the like the old fife and drum tradition before they even had guitars. I mean, we didn't have guitars down here till after the Spanish American War, you know, when the veterans brought them back as souvenirs, you know, the Black soldiers. And that's a style they developed up here, as they call it, the Hill Country style, just like kind of drone droning, groovy, interlocking, not not so much soloistic and just just kind of interlocking patterns and grooves a little bit like North African very much. So it's very much from the like west coast of Africa. So we're talking Molly Synegal, you know, but that's the African Americans that were settled here as slaves. That's where they were from them by and large, and so they translated the memories that they had and then the banjo playing, which was before the guitar. They translated that into a dance social music, but it fit perfectly with Sweet Oblivion the style. So I'm basically just doing like what some gentlemen up here would have done, like Junior Kimbro or R. L. Burnside or Mississippi Fred McDowell or somebody. I'm accompanying him in that style. It worked really good. It started with a loop I made on the violin, like Pitscotta loop a couple of years ago. That was just kind of odd and odd phreeze, and I tried to make it work with the band and it just didn't. One of those things that didn't didn't click. It got too normalized every time I tried to bring other people into it, until I brought it to you. Of course, no chance of it getting normalized with you. So how did you record this album? Did you record it in a special way because you wanted so much space around the instruments and around the voices. We had two, you know, our SA ribbon microphones, the forty four. We've always used those. And also because the violin is can be a bit stride, and you know, see the ribbon old ribbon mics kind of take the edge off a little bit, and the tape is pretty key that we're no strangers to doing things that way. We didn't really have time for overdubs or to overcomplicate things. I'm a fan of realism in recording, you know. I don't. I can see right through productions, you know, the conceit of certain choices being made and producing a record. The biggest choices you make are like what instrument is within arm's reach and you know that there's that initial choice, but not I don't like the post production choices. I can hear them. They're so transparent, you know. And to keep things in the realm of performance, you know, is important. Can you talk a bit about Stonewall eighteen sixty three? You mentioned performance, It's a very different kind of performance on this album. Yeah. I was watching the Ken Burns documentary on the Civil War. That's something I'm sort of haunted by and return to all the time, just because of where I live and the battle fields and the history that's here. It was just a line that was Stonewall Jackson, the general. It was just dying words, let us now cross over the river and rest needs the shade of the trees, you know. And I heard the narrator say that on the documentary, So what is such a beautiful way to go? No matter? You know, And he's shot and shattered and his body's tattered and torn. They're all blown apart. That one just really when I've really never sung that song before. It was just one of those moments I don't really want to sing that song too much, you know, it's like it's almost too painful for me, just back in my chromosomes somehow. Well, I'm also basing it on, like they call it in church, the primitive churches, when you're lining the songs out, so the preacher will say the word, the phrase it's about to be sung by the congregation. He says the next line that he wants them to sing in real time. And so I incorporated some of that old hymnal shape note singing in there, where I say the line and then you sing the line. And Viola had the idea to just take all the music away and just home, you know, And in a way, that's one of the most important parts of the album, just our two voices, just not even saying words, just syllables or just a home under your voice. Yeah, I mean, I was It's funny you mentioned the ken Burns thing, because he wouldn't. You'd think your inspiration is coming from you know, the soil down there, but not a PBS documentary. But nonetheless it's like an incredible document that film. And it was huge for me too because I I learned that there was like a kind of like a hit folk song that came out of that documentary, Yeah, which was written by Jay Unger, like a guy in upstate New York, and I became obsessed with it's player right, Yeah, he's a fiddle player. He and his wife Molly Mason, and they were on Prairie Home Companions a lot in the when was that nineties, which I listened to religiously at the time, and that song paid you know, I owe them royalties because I played that for every wedding, every funeral, everywhere, and people just I always felt something when I played it. It was just strange. This modern folk tune was so impactful and also paid my rent for the first you know, when I was in college. You know that in the Pocabell's cannon pretty much kept you in soup that went when some one would come to talk to me about doing their wedding, they'd ask for Taco Bell Cannon, and I would say, how about how about not Taco Bill Cannon, Let's do a choking farewell instead. You love it. I do want to ask you about in an album that has many songs about people on the other side, meaning death, suddenly you're just on the other side of a red, red velvet rope. But it seemed it seemed as impenetrable somehow. But Beat Still my Heart, which I just thought was just a lovely song, it had a very different sound to me. I'm not sure what style of song that is exactly. I was watching a friend of mine who's about my age. I'm fifty three. I think we're about the same age. And he's a great musician and he has been his entire life. He's very well known. I won't say his name, but he has pretty severe mental illness and its psychosis. And I was watching him. I hadn't seen him perform in a long time, and he was on stage It'll Bar Down in the Delta, and he was actually just really having a really hard time on stage. He almost didn't know where he was and he didn't know what he was supposed to be doing. Type of moment in front of people, and that's what I wrote for him. Yeah, but that that theme of the other side you brought up something I didn't even think about. That it's not just someone being on the other side of the velvet rope, but in Three White Horses, we're talking about the other side. Or I've been obsessed with the line over the years and pops up on almost every record of the Fatal Shore and the crossing the river to between, like the threshold between life and death or any kind of threshold has been always like a constant undercurrent in my writing. And you only think about these things in retrospect when you have to talk about them when the record comes out. But yeah, it's interesting how much that comes up. Can you tell me, Jimbo, you had trouble with that song before? What was it about this collaboration that made it possible for you to do that song. I think just Andrew's voice, you know, just he's got a such a We have such different voices, you know, they blend together very well when we're singing harmonies. Just the tone of his voice versus mind. Maybe he just had a fresh approach to it. I mean, did singing Jimbo's songs like Burn the honky Tonk in particular, it's one of my favorites to hear on the album because it brings something out in my voice that I don't often write songs myself to tap that tone in my voice and that that sort of Marty Robbins big crooner thing, and I guess Pete still has that too, just kind of like a big romantic approach. Most of my songs are like every syllable is accounted for and the melody has already worked out, So I'm just kind of, you know, it's a different process and kind of the same feeling you get when you do a cover of a song you like, you know, you find you can sing a different way, you know, But I didn't. I didn't quite know I had that in me. Is that what came out on or in the Honckey Talk? But it's such a so satisfying every time I do that song, I just like feel the resonance in my chest and in a way that doesn't happen on my own songs. Well, I guess that's what a great collaboration is supposed to do. So thank you so much for talking about this. I think it's a terrific album. I hope everybody hears it when COVID is over. Is it something you're going to tour with or do you have plans for it? Yeah? But plans no, We're just it's hard to have any plans that the only thing I'm hoping is that they might try to pull off Newport Folk Fest this summer because it's kind of a it's a fairly contained kind of festival. It seems like if anyone could maybe pull it off, it would be them. Okay, thank you so much. It's been wonderful. We appreciate y'all. Thank you. Take care so yeah, Andrew, Yeah, see Jim Bye buddy. Thanks to Andrew Bird and Jimbo for hanging out with Bruce and talking about the inspiration behind their new album These thirteen Do you hear? A playlist of our favorite songs from Jimbo and Andrew's careers, head to Broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribed to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find extended cuts of new and old episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose. Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is Mia Label Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries and if you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast. The music expect any beats. I'm Justin Richmond, bass,

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