‘The musicians drank too much and slept on the floor of my barn’: Andrew Bird on producing cult album The Mysterious Production of Eggs | culture

Andrew Bird, singer, songwriter, violin, guitar, instrument, whistle

We had a family farm three hours west of Chicago, and when I was looking at potential studio spaces, I remembered some of the barns where my brother and I used to make hay bale forts when we were kids. One of them was in rough shape and had raccoons living in it, but I got a local carpenter to do the handyman work and did the normal stuff like the roof shingles. Then I just moved in, but I didn’t realize how isolated it would be. It was February and snowing and none of my friends had a car. I would go for two weeks at a time without speaking to anyone. So I started experimenting with the loop pedal and messing around with songs.

I was playing all day and night in some kind of fever, playing pop, jazz, violin, guitars and polyrhythms, while wrestling with some demons. In middle school, I was no ordinary thinker. I was bullied and thought I was autistic, so I would explain it all in songs. Sitting in a Denny’s restaurant at 4 a.m. would produce some silly humor: a nervous jerk of the head to the left about a move you’ve adopted to get rid of dark thoughts. People must have thought I was crazy, and I sat there shaking my head.

Other songs on the album are about the commodification of genius as a marketing strategy or warrior culture. With Fake Palindromes, I imagined a personal ad in a newspaper where someone puts innocuous details and then gets progressively more subversive as they really want someone to pry them.

Bringing musicians into the fold for an album release proved confusing: people slept on the floor and drank a lot. So I moved to Nashville – where I made the album Weather Systems to blow off some steam – and tried to record Eggs there, but that didn’t work out either. I would tear my hair out, then jump in my truck with my gear and tour all over Europe.

“Man, you really need to go to New York or Los Angeles,” said a Chicago music bar owner. In Los Angeles, a producer directed me to a young engineer, David Boucher. Finally, after five strange and fanatical years, recording with David and the musicians in a professional environment where people work sane hours has brought to life the integrity of the album’s styles, themes, layers and many details.

I was 29 and feeling like I was back in the day, but suddenly I felt like an artist, not just someone directing my record collection. The title comes from an old magic catalog from the 1920s which says “Mystical Production of Eggs”. I changed the word “mystical” to “mysterious,” but it seems to capture the excitement of creating something that never existed before.

Andrea Trulin, Director

The first time I went to the barn to visit Andrew, I drove until there were no more cars. Much later, when I read the story of Justin Vernon making Bon Iver’s first album in a log cabin, I laughed and thought, “Dude, we did that.” But it was helpful for Andrew’s music to start a record without the usual cacophony of life in the mix, although having the album canceled twice is highly unusual.

In the barn, there were some really wild and complex orchestral rock sessions, but they didn’t sound like him. I said: It is as if you are wearing someone else’s clothing. Creating Weather Systems in Nashville was partly an attempt to get something going, because he didn’t have a record label and was dipping into his piggy bank or using his touring income to pay for the band. Part of the reason for using a barn is because there is no rent.

I went there a few times and also visited him in Nashville and Los Angeles to see what was going on. Playing the songs live helped him all the time because he was able to get immediate feedback on what worked and what didn’t. I took copious notes as we went through everything, trying to piece together the parts worth holding on to and encouraging him not to stop until he felt like it was over.

I have to have 100 CDs of Eggs with different versions of songs and track sequences before we settle on the final version. He came up with something that people found difficult to compare, because it wasn’t another version of someone else’s thing. I was thrilled when people liked it.