Never underestimate the power of music.
These past few years, I’d almost forgotten that.
Forgotten that some music has the power to possess you.
Music that turns your skin to goose flesh. Music that makes the hair on your arms stand on end. Music that makes your throat taut and tense. Music that leaves you catching your breath, that sends a rush of blood to every fibre in your body.
It penetrates you, touches a little hidden spot somewhere in your brain, that sparks and resonates through your whole being.
Mystical music, spiritual music, heady, crazy, mesmerising, sweet, sweet music.
Andrew Bird makes this sort of music. His is a sound that possesses you, that fills you, that sends you into embarassing babbling raptures such as this.
But never mind. Better this, this feeling of shock, this trembling awe, than no feeling at all.
When Bird took the stage in the Paradiso last Friday night, I must admit that I wasn’t prepared for it, wasn’t aware that this voice existed.
It struck me dumb.
The sounds had been slowly building up before he took the stage. Layer upon layer of guitar, violin and drum interspersed with a wavering, distant, melancholic whistling.
A lonely, langorous sound. The whistle of someone lost in a desert at night, stuck down some deep gorge with just the night sky above them and this strange, dark, echoing space enclosing them. A space they fill with a whistle.
A heady mix that stilled the audience with an anticipation you could feel.
It rose and rose and then this voice, pure, tremorous and clear, filtered through the sound and sent that electrical buzz to my brain.
And I cried.
I honestly and truly couldn’t contain it, all that music. I needed that release before I could begin to listen, before I could allow it to seep into me and settle in under my skin.
That delicious moment, when the music slips inside you and stays there, a little piece of beauty and wonder that you can keep and call up whenever the mood takes you. That sound in your head that stays forever.
And there’s no doubting it. Andrew Bird is in my head, under my skin, reverberating and making me tremble.
It’s a madness, I know, but it’s a beautiful sort of possession, a healthy kind of insanity, a joyousness that reminds me how good it is to sometimes simply be…
3 responses to “Gimme Back My Heart Andrew Bird”
[…] Two musical discoveries today. I read about the Andrew Bird concert over at the Paradiso at Jen’s blog this morning. Had never heard of him, but the enthusiasm of Jen’s post put him on my Listen list. Well lo and behold, he was featured in heavy rotation on a colleague’s iTunes library at work (we share a subnet, so we can share iTunes libraries) and I found a new friend. […]
I once saw a group perform a very different kind of music. They were just using day-to-day things … for example, one tune would be based in the kitchen where they would use all the utensils possible to create a tune. It was breathtaking! I remember not breathing for such a long time. I had to conciously start breathing 🙂 It was just awesome.
My memory fails me as to what was the name of that group …
Hi Jen,
I had never heard of Andrew Bird. I just checked out his site and downloaded Nervous Tic. It’s pretty good. I had seen a guitarist, Tommy Emanuel, at Carnegie Hall last summer in honour of Les Paul’s 90th birthday party. Tommy brought down the house. His music moves me. Being somewhat of a guitarist I focus more on their playing than on what they’re saying Hey, I’m a poet and I don’t even know it. I have a few songs posted. I surely would not quit my day job but music has an incredible healing power I feel. I’d be lost without it.