The thing is, as Bird certainly knows but fewer listeners have attended to, there are no outside problems without inside ones, or inside problems without outside ones. And it’s all happening inside, no one is privy to it.” “In the way I figure,” Bird opens the preview video, “there’re two types of problems in this world: inside problems and outside problems. This is in contrast to the political focus of Bird’s prior release, 2019’s My Finest Work Yet, which inserted Bird’s musings into historical processes, down to the cover art positioning the artist in a bathtub after Jacques-Louis David’s famous canvas, The Death of Marat. Not surprisingly, given the spoken-word video preview of the album released last April, the reception of Inside Problems has focused on interiority and reflection. At other times, he nails everything, down to the shifting sections and traditions of a song like “Danse Caribe” on the 2012 album Break It Yourself or the Velvet Underground undertones subsumed within an almost straightforward love song in “The Night Before Your Birthday” off the new album Inside Problems. Some of the best of Andrew Bird’s music has come when he’s been willing to pare it down: the hypnotic 2016 duet with Esperanza Spalding on Alice Coltrane’s “Journey in Satchidananda” or the missing folk-rock classic “Three White Horses” on the 2012 EP Hands of Glory. Add to that a compositional palette that can reference the allegretto of Beethoven’s seventh symphony in one song and summon the cello and guitar parts of the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” on the same violin in another, and it’s a wonder any of it ever holds together at all. An Andrew Bird song has so many moving parts – bowed and plucked violin looped and layered whistling as texture and as solo voice lyrics by turns hermetic, clever, allusive, and affective – on top of the bass, drums, guitar, and keyboard you’d expect to hear from an indie-pop band.
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