thank you, andrew bird, for rocking my world

I love to snow shoe.

On an unrelated musical note -- back in July 2007, I sat at Crocodile Cafe and stole 30 precious minutes of super fast Ugandan internet to download Armchair Apocrypha on iTunes. Since that night, Scythian Empires has been the soundtrack for my life. It reminds me of interminable bus rides across northern Uganda, giraffes, Red Stripe and my big fat tears at Bird's show in Baltimore last year. I'd never been emotionally moved by music before, and haven't been since...


...perhaps until tonight, when I found out that Andrew Bird has a new CD streaming on NPR this week - it comes out January 20th. So Andrew and I had a few glasses of wine while I giggled with joy over new turns of whistles and violins, and his lyrical genius. For example:

Tenuous at best was all he had to say
when pressed about the rest of it, the world that is
from proto-Sanskrit Minoans to Porto-centric Lisboans
Greek Cypriots and and harbor-sorts who hang around in quotes a lot

Here's where things start getting weird
while chinless men will scratch their beards
and to their minds a sharpened axe
is brushed upon the Uralic syntaxes

Love of hate acts as an axis
Love of hate acts as an axis
First it wanes and then it waxes
So procreate and pay your taxes

2009 has a new soundtrack, and it's called Noble Beast.