Andrew Bird Delivered a Masterclass in Musicianship: Review

Andrew Bird is a violin virtuoso on his own, but the indie-folk musician broke a musical threshold with a full string section around him when he played with the Colorado Symphony at Boettcher Concert Hall on November 13.

Bird, who has collaborated with such artists as Fiona Apple, Neko Case, St. Vincent and Owen Pallett, is currently on an orchestra tour to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of The Mysterious Production of Eggs, his playfully heartbreaking, acclaimed third solo studio album that cemented his voice and unique musical style in the indie space in 2005.

Bird would go on to create other masterpieces like Armchair Apocrypha, Are You Serious and My Finest Work Yet, but his nearly sold-out Denver concert comprised a complete playthrough of Eggs with the orchestra.

“It’s twenty years since this album came out and 23 years since I started working on it. It took three tries. You know, it’s kind of a trip all these years later, doing such a grand presentation. I was reminiscing, and back then, I wasn’t sure if I was really paying attention to what I was writing, and I was making inside jokes for myself that I see now, and they’re things that I don’t know why that amused me at the time,” Bird said to a laughing audience.

Personal inside jokes or not, such lyrics as “Under the miser / barely alive / we cover the blisters in flannel / though the words we speak are banal” and “You were in the ground in late November, when the leaves and earth were damp / Did you / did you think they would remember? / How you almost made state champ?” set Bird apart as a poetic wordsmith. And those words were further enlivened by the mastery of the orchestra.

Under conductor Jacomo Bairos’s fluid direction, melancholy chord progressions became even more devastating and triumphant flourishes even more powerful as Bird expertly whistled and sang along, sometimes slinging his guitar over his shoulder to join in on his violin mid-song. “There’s something about the way this show makes you sing,” Bird said. “It brings something out of you that would never come out in a recording studio.”

Bird has stood out from other indie musicians with his violin fingerpicking and expertly in-key whistling, but the artist was met with a surprise in the middle of the concert, when an audience member shouted for everyone to whistle after an applause. As Boettcher Hall filled with the eerie tones of hundreds of people whistling in a room with great acoustics, Bird looked slightly bewildered. “I’ve never heard that before,” he said.

The whistling continued after each applause for the rest of the show, bemusing Bird. “It’s like we were visited by aliens tonight,” he said.

Bird and the symphony received a standing ovation after finishing their playthrough of Eggs and treated the audience to a few extras, including “Three White Horses,” “Pulaski at Night” and “Weather Systems.”

“I don’t know if you heard that line from [Antonín] Dvořák…it’s all kind of by design,” Bird said of his musical influences. “In high school, Dvořák was my guy. The violin concertos were the soundtrack to my high school goth years.”

Bird fondly reminisced on his concert at Red Rocks in 2022 and said he hoped to play the venue again, maybe this time with an orchestra. We hope he will, too.

Find more concerts on our Denver concert calendar.