As your counselor I advise you to go to Andrew Bird's show at the Canopy Club

Andrew Bird is unmistakably one of the musical geniuses of our time. Lucky for us, he is coming to the Canopy Club in Champaign, Illinois on Monday, January 30. What marks a musical genius? Well, in my humble opinion I think it is someone who blurs the lines of genres, someone who is so unique you can’t really pin point their work as this or that, and someone who progresses the mental understanding of note progression through melody or instrumentation. It is a person or group of people that are hell bent on challenging their reasoning for a finished product, a rationale for every decision on the final album. Andrew Bird certainly carries those characteristics throughout all of his works. Some may recognize his work from the score of FX original series Baskets, created by Louis C.K., Zach Galifianakis, and Jonathan Krisel, or the song he wrote for The Muppets called “The Whistling Caruso”, where he performed the whistling heard in the film and the soundtrack. If he still isn’t on the radar then he should be known because of his album released last year. The album Are You Serious, released on April 1, 2016 is nothing short of a grand tale about the growth of a piece of art and it’s post adolescent release into the real world. According to Andrew Bird on his commentary from his Spotify release called Are We not Burning: The Devolution of Capsized, the song “Capsized” has taken on various forms for about 13 years. The album it appears on, Are You Serious, has been a working title for the last three albums. If you’re an artist and are wondering, “Do I feel like this work is done yet?” It would do you well to watch some of his interviews on Youtube or Spotify about the album. When asked whether or not he knew when he was officially done with a piece of work, Bird could only say that a song on an album is only that song in that glimpse of time, almost to imply that the song grows and gains new sound or direction as his personality does. To put it simply Andrew Bird states in his interview with Face Culture, “Are songs ever finished? I just think the recorded version is a moment in time.” So what am I trying to say? I am saying that if you miss this show you will have missed an incredibly talented artist playing at “home.” As relative as this statement is, I think he could be considered as the most talented artist to play at the Canopy Club this year. If you were a musician, or just a plain ol’ music junky, you would be doing a disservice to yourself if you missed this show. I mean after all, I highly doubt Excision or anybody that will play at the Canopy Club this year have played with arguably the greatest cellist of our time, Yo Yo Ma (he’s recorded over 90 albums and has received 17 Grammy Awards) and leave him thoroughly impressed. You can purchase your tickets to the show at the Canopy Club here. See you there!      ]]>