An interview from oh comely issue ten.

In his latest album, Andrew Bird's musical style has begun to relax, but when we talk the same could not be said for the man himself. For years, he has suffered a level of social anxiety that he describes as almost crippling. His nervous energy is palpable when meeting him in a hotel room in London. He's a man who stares intently into your eyes as he speaks and puzzles through answers that invariably go off point: fluent, yet unruly, and always beguiling, much like his music. He says that a journalist recently told him he was self-conscious during an interview. "I thought, ‘You fucking do eight interviews in a row and try not to be self-conscious.' That rubbed me the wrong way. Being self-conscious is inherent in the whole thing."

Bird is a man that rides a bike, prefers the countryside to the city, and goes to bed early while his band mates "raise hell", but he's no wallflower. He's charted a slow but steady rise to success as a whimsical, whistling multi-instrumentalist, famous for his haunting, beautiful melodies and obscure, intelligent lyrics. This year sees the release of a new album, Break It Yourself. The album follows a two-year hiatus where, among other things, he recorded a Muppets soundtrack, developed an ambitious musical museum installation called the Sonic Arboretum and became a father to nine-month-old Sam-a new phase he describes as total happiness.

Bird paints a picture of a carefree childhood in Lake Bluff, Michigan, running wild with his siblings, escaping into deep ravines and building forts. Nowadays, with New York as home, he frequently escapes to his family farm outside Chicago. It was here that he recorded Break It Yourself during idyllic summer days, with windows and doors open, and dining al fresco. In the past, Bird has described performing as a joy and recording as a necessary evil. This time, it wasn't so bad. Bird's band brought the recording process as close as possible to a live performance: "It was only intended to be a rehearsal jam session with tape rolling but I secretly hoped I'd get it, and I did. With some of the songs the band didn't know until half an hour before we got the take. They were just feeling it out. You can sense that wobbliness, like at the end of Desperation Breeds."

Performance is where Bird thrives, content to risk even the most complicated looping arrangements to audiences of thousands, a set-up that begs for human or technical error. In fact, he relishes the unpredictable. He says, "When I get up on stage, I can relax. I feel like I know what I'm doing. There's the unknown of what could happen, which I really love. I could even go so far as to say I cultivate precarious situations: that flush of embarrassment, the feeling of trying to pull out of a nosedive."

Moments of embarrassment and self-consciousness are something Bird has learned to value in his music. He explains, "If I feel like, ‘I can't write this,' or with a record, ‘I can't do this,' I've found that's generally a good sign that I'm on to something. In every record and every song, I'm usually puzzling through something."

One of the concepts Bird explores on his new album reveals itself in the title, a line taken from the first single Eyeoneye, and an idea he presented at a TED talk two years ago. He looks at how, when things in nature become too self-sufficient, or get too close to their source, they become self-destructive, almost as if they're in a feedback loop. He applies this to his own heart, exploring the idea that if he continues on a path of self-preservation with "armour so complete" then the only way to experience heartbreak is to achieve the impossible and do it to himself. He says, "I think it has to do with the struggle between being so self-sufficient, being so contained, which we are all taught is a virtuous thing to achieve, and then being like, ‘Wait, what else is there?' There's the issue of autonomy being overrated, and needing community, needing to make yourself more vulnerable."

Listening to Break It Yourself, you can hear this idea influencing Bird's music. Gone are the complex words, like dermestid and plecostomus, that peppered his earlier lyrics. In their place is a more open, vulnerable album exploring themes of love and the pursuit of happiness. He says, "That's been a breakthrough for me with this record. There are still some pretty out-there concepts, like on Eyeoneye, but it ranges from the bizarre scientific to the human more than it has in the past. Before, I was content to keep the song entirely in a metaphor, there was a bit of encoding going on in the language. I could tell you personally the meaning of every song I've ever written, but it's not going to be obvious or on my sleeve." Break It Yourself has lines he would never have allowed himself to write five years ago. "Back then, I'd have said they were clichés, but now... Well, there's a reason why they are clichés: they make sense."

Despite the new tone in his music, he's reluctant to give an answer to whether he thinks people should make themselves more vulnerable. Conclusions like that make him uncomfortable, and he prefers to leave his music open-ended: "It's like you enter a tunnel and come out the other end, and something's happened but it's not concluded. It feels a little like giving up when you make conclusions."

Andrew Bird is performing at No Direction Home Festival, happening 8th to 10th June this summer.