Web: Andrew Bird blogs for The New York Times

(photo by Cameron Wittig)

In "Measure for Measure", the paper's column about songwriters and the recording process, Andrew Bird takes us into The Loft, Wilco's home turf, giving us a brief look into his own recording processes, microphone sounds and the differences between "head voice" and "chest voice".

Recording is full of counterintuitive stuff like this, so you can see how quickly the original sentiment of a song can get derailed.

There is also no guarantee that singing with emotional abandon that feels so right at that moment won’t sound totally wrong on playback. I have this intense aversion to canned emotion, yet that’s exactly what recording is: a reconstituted, canned facsimile of a performance. I am determined to subvert this and perhaps that’s why I ascribe mystical/religious properties to microphones, tape machines record players — technology that still physically touches something else. Conversely, I regard computers as necessary but heretical and potentially corrupting collaborators.

(mp3)    Andrew Bird - The Trees Were Mistaken

Godspeed!