was browsing in borders last evening, and came across a quote from a book that listed about 500 annoying things. haha.. i should so co-author that book - me and my list of pet peeves :P
analyzer. logist. The best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after the things that interest you and make you happy. Stop acting like you have a set path, because you don’t. No one does. You shouldn’t be trying to check off the boxes of life; they aren’t real and they were created by other people, not you.nicked from a blog i stalk ;) shhh..
— Charlie Hoehn
"I do not have clear answers to current questions. I have questions, and, as a matter of fact, I think a man is better known by his questions than his answers. To make known one's questions is, no doubt, to come out in the open oneself. I am not in the market for the ready-made and wholesale answers so easily volunteered by the public and I question nothing so much as the viability of public and popular answers, including some of those which claim to be most progressive."via patrolmag
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
Is this abstractness in your lyrics a purported need to make your listeners run circles in dictionaries or is it an actual extension of how you are? Either way, why this is so?
AB: I appreciate that a listener would want to decipher what I'm talking about, but the pursuit of definition misses the point. When I listen to songs it could all be Portuguese as far as I'm concerned. Besides vagaries lead to the listener using their own imagination. When a song is fully comprehended it is more likely to be discarded - or at least that’s how I listen.
In answering the question why we should care about an author’s intention, C. S. Lewis gives two answers in his book An Experiment in Criticism.i would apply the same when listening to a song
"Why," they ask, "should I turn from a real present experience—what the poem means to me, what happens to me when I read it—to inquire about the poet’s intentions or reconstructions, always uncertain of what it may have meant to his contemporaries?"
There seem to be two answers. One, is that the poem in my head which I make from my mistranslations of Chaucer or misunderstandings of Donne, may not be so good as the work Chaucer or Donne actually made.
Secondly, why not have both? After enjoying what I made of it, why not go back to the text this time looking up the hard words, puzzling out the allusions and discovering that some metrical delights in my first experience where due to my fortunate mispronunciations, and see whether I can enjoy the poet’s poem, not necessarily instead of, but in addition to my own
Here’s something that fascinates me - do you in actual fact speak the way you write? Do you use all those huge words in daily conversation? Is it normal for Andrew Bird to use the word ‘radiolarian’ in everyday conversation for example?
AB: No, of course not. Songwriting and the language I'm drawn to is maybe an escape from the everyday vernacular. Expressing yourself in a matter of fact way helps get you through the day but it’s rarely lyrical. I look for beautiful sounding words yes, but they are far from random. Radiolarians are these undersea slimy creatures that apparently communicate in an electrical sort of telekinesis. I could have used a flock of birds or school of fish to make my point but that would seem cliche or new-agey.
