I Paint You A Picture But It Never Looks Right

It took Andrew Bird to get us out of our cozy house the other night, and I still have his music in my head.  His singing voice is melodious and versatile, and his songs, which reflect elements of jazz, folk, and classical music, simply refuse to fit into any particular genre. I don't even know how to write about his beautifully layered compositions, with their loops of violin, guitar, and glockenspiel, and his own extraordinary whistling. He has been described as a one-man orchestra of the imagination, and that about sums it up.

One highlight of the show (and there were many) was a new song, Pulaski At Night. Pulaski Road is a major north-south thoroughfare in Chicago–and, as Bird noted in his introduction to the song, it's not really a place you'd particularly want to see at night–but the song is a nostalgic tribute to his hometown, which he refers to not as the Windy City, but a city of light. Then again, maybe the song is a nostalgic tribute to anything lost or left behind, remembered and described but impossible to capture.

"I tell you a story," he sings, "but it loses its thread" and "I paint you a picture but it never looks right..."

An arrangement of loops, strums, plucks, and notes frame the lyrics and take us away, back to Chicago, or somewhere else.

I even appreciated the fact that Bird had ridden his bike in Santa Barbara earlier in the day, and that he'd looked toward the ocean and heard its cry.

Here's a little bio about him on the TED website.