E Pluribus Unum

I've been listening to Andrew Bird's newest CD Armchair Apocrypha and one cut in particular, called Imitosis. It's an acoustic melody in a minor key and I finally had a chance to read the lyrics. Coming at a time when we're absorbing the news from Virginia Tech and Iraq, it's really pretty haunting:

Why do some show no mercy
Where others are painfully shy?
Tell me doctor can you quantify?
he just wants to know the reasons why.

In live performance Bird records a lot of instrumentation on the fly and plays it back as accompaniment to himself playing...other instruments. He creates rich layers of sound -- violin, guitar, xylophone, even whistling. You can hear all kinds of influences -- gypsy, middle eastern, but there's also echos of other performers like Tom York (Radiohead) and Sufjan Stevens. But really, it's like nothing you've heard before. My daughter saw him at the Majestic Theater in Detroit and was blown away.

Here's Andrew Bird appearing on the Letterman show playing Plasticities, also from the same CD.

Here's Bird singing Why: