I was trying to get a good balance of the country blues and then the country churchy stuff.
#Andrew bird bell witch full
It was full of range from traditional country type to early country. There were probably 20 to 30 bits and pieces you’d send me, and I was trying to steer it towards more in the Charley Patton direction. It wasn’t a thing we brought to recordings per se.ĪB: Jimbo kept sending me songs. You can hear the whole future of everything that you hear now in his recordings. Just hear the gears of American music being forged. The rural Mississippi musician that I had close ties to. JM: It was just a reconnection on folk music, the rich music we both learned and appreciated such as Charley Patton, for example. When you reconnected, did you know what sound you were going for? It’s so different from Squirrel Nut Zippers. You can really hear - just some of the things that he does with his feel and his phrasing. I saw a need for people to really hear some of the nuance and this lost vernacular that he still has, is keeping alive that I want to expose that in a particular way without any other musicians. We went off on the trail and then Andrew reached out to me starting about two years ago and said, “Hey, let’s get together and just do some duo performing and writing.”ĪB: I always had back of my mind, I wanted to do a super stripped-down duo fiddle guitar thing with Jimbo I had been following what Jimbo was doing. JM: We kind of forged each other’s future at that time. Hanging with these eccentric Southern characters and I’m 23 years old, I’m in New Orleans and music just everywhere, part of everyday life. Then meeting Jimbo is just like, there wasn’t much talk.
I was just so ready to jump in and participate. A lot of them are iconic records, and most of them were down in New Orleans.ĪB: Up in Chicago, there was a lot of talk about music. We were just tabulating yesterday, seven records in four years. JM: We met each other at the perfect times. What do you think would have happened if you hadn’t met? Andrew said, “I wonder what would happen if we hadn’t met.” That would be interesting to postulate. I was already into this early jazz stuff and I thought, “Here’s a living example of what I thought was lost art.” He’s like a mentor to me, a living musician that I really looked up to and he really set me on a course. I saw the difference in Black Mountain and Jimbo. It’s slightly more like a cerebral buttoned-up kind of atmosphere. That was my first impression.Īndrew Bird: I was pretty fresh out of music school at Northwestern. He was a bit younger than me and I had an established group going, but I immediately just recognized in him some incredible talent and immediately tried to bring him into my family, into my band at that time. Jimbo Mathus: I just thought he was a brilliant musician, and there was obviously a lot there. What was your first impression when you met each other? In light of Squirrel Nut Zippers’ swinging, dance-ready beats, when asked how they achieved such a beautiful, melodic, heart-wrenching collection with These 13, with the folksy air of hopeful melancholy, Jimbo says: “As one of my mentors taught me…fun sticks to tape.” He laughs.
It’s not like we were estranged, but we just didn’t talk anymore until fairly recently.” They started the new album in 2018 and completed it just before quarantine 2020, and filmed a documentary ( via Thirty Tigers) about the process. As Jimbo describes in his signature southern drawl: “I went onto my path and went onto path, and all the great records made. They’d parted ways amicably to do their own thing around 2000, but came together nearly two decades later to make the album that would eventually turn out to be These 13. In speaking with these two old friends of 25 years, their mutual respect and devotion to their craft is at the forefront. “I’ve never made a record that was more fun to make and as easy and gratifying than this one,” Andrew says. It’s a museum-worthy, American-quilt-apple-pie comfort, perfect for our times right now. This is the kind of album you’ll listen to over and over, because it adapts to every phase, every mood, each lyric laced with heart-wrenching and, sometimes, lighthearted simplicity. Only Mississippian Jimbo Mathus and Chicagoan Andrew Bird could compose an album so different from their platinum-selling Squirrel Nut Zippers’ roots, yet with the same sense of tender nostalgia that will endure until the end of time.Ĭo-written and performed exclusively by the two of them, their new record, These 13, is undoubtedly American folk, an homage to tradition, songwriting, and a sound embodying an endless optimism, even in its most sentimental songs.
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