Nights Like These Draw Me Out Walking

Spring has sprung and just like an ice cream truck theme song, there are some great new bits of songsmithing that have captured my imagination.

First off, I have Andrew Bird's new Armchair Apocrypha (listen to the complete disc here) running on repeat most nights. As we have seen of late, there are plenty of rockers dipping into the chamber sound and some fantastic string players playing with and within the genre. But perhaps because I was once a rather serious violinist myself, I can be pretty harsh in my personal assessments of these projects. Appreciate yes, but praise--um, not so much. Bird has always stood way out in front of the crowd in this area for me, exhibiting a deep mastery yet measured control of his instrument's capabilities and working intriguing ideas into the texture of the music he creates without letting any sound in too far center stage. Mixed with lyrics that can still surprise your ear even after quite a few passes and the whistling--oh, the most excellent whistling--it's a dreamy package. If you like what you hear, do dig backwards into his catalog to sample some rawer yet delicious tracks.

Also on the spring fantasy playlist are all that bands I discovered while editing an article about music in New Orleans by Aurora Nealand. Seriously, the woman should get a cut from the NOLA tourism association. The best part of working on this piece was getting to the middle of the article before realizing that all of the many projects mentioned up to that point played outside. In the street. Parades! My northern city girl blindness had me laughing out loud, and 15 minutes and some concentrated Googling had me clicking through tons of new music. Come on, would you have been able to resist tracking down a band with a name like Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship? That's got to be a hindrance when it comes to snagging marquee space, I would assume, but I like their moxie.

'Tis the season, I guess, for spring sprucing and the gathering of new music to fill the newly reclaimed clean spaces. Now that it's warm enough to leave the windows open at night, I wonder what the neighbors are into...