Andrew Bird

“I've always been fascinated and stared at maps for hours as a kid. I've especially been most intrigued by the uninhabited or lonelier places on the planet. Like Greenland, for instance, or just recently flying over Alaska and a chain of icy, mountainous islands, uninhabited.”

“I've done my share of busking, and it's fun until it isn't. There are musicians in the subways that will make you cry, they're so good.”

“I think when I was pretty young I got really into the tone of my instrument and I remember just playing one note for an hour to just kind of feel the resonance of the violin.”

“Melodies are just honest. They can only be what they are. Words have the capacity for deception. They're all full of subtext, and some of them are cliche and overused and vernacular. They're tricky. All I can say is, words are tricky.”

“I create little challenges for myself, like, 'Okay, whatever you do in this song, you've got to somehow work in Greek Cypriots,' or something like that.”

“I write a lot more when I'm happy, because you're hopeful, you're motivated.”

“Music as a social conduit has always been important to me.”

“I guess I'm attracted to more archaic words because they can be imbued with more meaning, because their definition is elusive.”

“Usually bands with violins - it's this little, poorly amplified looking kind of futile on stage, and that's not the way that my music is put together.”

“Guitars are kind of just, you know, sexy, especially old vintage ones.”

“No, it's not dissatisfaction that inspires me to tinker with my songs, it's just restlessness.”

“There's a lot of interesting words, nomenclatures, in science.”

“The first notes I still play when I start a sound check are classical. Those are my roots.”

“What's cool about indie rock is that one band can do effectively the same thing as another band, and one band nails it, and the other one doesn't. I like that elusiveness.”

“Since I first picked up the violin, I've been very interested in tone and texture: I would have very visceral reactions to the texture of a snare drum or a pedal steel guitar or a violin.”

“The problem is, when you're working with orchestras, you only get the orchestra for about two hours before the performance to pull it all together, and that doesn't sound like a real collaboration.”

“The idea of writing songs because you're depressed and you need to communicate it somehow, that isn't really true for me.”

“Every time I get up in the morning, melodies occur to me and I start trying to shape lyrics to melodies.”

“Well, my main instrument is violin, but I think of myself as a songwriter who happens to play violin.”

“The way I work, I'm not a confessional singer-songwriter.”