Call us shamelessly grandiose, but when the dust settles on the first disheartening decade of our new century, we're certain that Andrew Bird will be widely acknowledged as one of the artists who best captured (and playfully tweaked) our era's portentous zeitgeist. Indie-rock critics and bloggers have been lauding him for years, and now Bird is finally selling out the big clubs (and touring in a BioDiesel bus). On his albums, his rich, multi-textural sound defies definition as it plunges into dense, hypnotic reveries mottled with lyrics that are often as emotionally stirring as they are whimsical. In concert, Bird's songs become a high-wire marvel to behold, as he lays down multiple loops of himself on a variety of instruments with which he then plays along, joined by and his current fearless and talented tour-mates, Martin Dosh and Jeremy Ylvisaker.

Bird recently spoke with Gothamist from the road about his "perilous" David Letterman appearance, his lost chickens and his source for socks. His latest album, Armchair Apocrypha, can be purchased from many sources, including his website. His Thursday night concert at Webster Hall is sold out.

In a matter of a couple of years, you've gone from selling out Southpaw to selling out Webster Hall and playing big festivals. How are you adapting to bigger rooms?
It’s challenging and it’s been hard to catch up given how fast things are going, you know? For so many years I’ve been kind of in the trenches running everything myself. Now I’ve had to delegate just to get enough help to pull it all off and it’s taken a lot to figure that out. But I like it. You know when you’re at the big festivals outside or in big rooms it brings a different kind of energy out of you. I sing differently. And I like it. Though it’s nice to switch it up and play small rooms now and then just to make sure you’re not getting too ham-fisted with it. That’s the risk sometimes; that the subtlety might be lost and it just becomes the rock. So it’s kind of a balance; like every other show we try to switch up the set-list and I’ve been doing more solo stuff just to remind ourselves what that sounds like.

You're mixing up the set list every night on this tour?
Yeah, one night might be the big kind of "creating a huge wall of sound". You know, there’s three of us now on stage and all three of us are creating loops all at the same time. So it can get pretty psychedelic and big-sounding. And every night we’re kind of figuring out different techniques of looping each other and morphing the sound into something that goes beyond us, you know? But after two shows like that we’ll play a show where I do a couple of solo songs in the middle of the set just to balance out, to make sure we’re not getting too orgasmic.

When you played Bowery Ballroom in January the show got off to a rocky start. There were technical problems with the Delay Modeler right? Then when someone in the audience suggested you take off your shoes that seemed to solve everything. I was surprised because I thought with all the touring you do you'd routinely take off your shoes as soon as you got on stage.
That really wasn’t the problem; I just made it seem like it was. Yeah, every couple shows I’ll start off the set and the loop just simply won’t work, it just won’t be making the sound. It wasn’t an execution thing; it’s just that for some reason the looping device needs to get reset every couple shows. I just have to twiddle some knobs and then it works. It’s always enough to keep you kind of spooked when you go on stage. But yeah, that variable just becomes part of the show. And there are sometimes execution issues. After 22 shows in a row the callous on my thumb becomes so intensely thick that it's like I’m just playing with someone else’s thumb [on the violin].

And you don’t use a pick.
Right, I play guitar with the same thumb. So it’s like playing with a dead person’s thumb. So it gets a lot harder to execute the precise pizzicato loops that have to be dead on for everyone to play along with. Sometimes I have to redo it once or twice and there’s this sort of tension that builds up in the audience until I get it right. That just becomes part of the show I think and it kind of makes it clear to everyone that there’s no pre-recorded tracks, that there’s no hard drive back there playing the sound for us. It’s truly perilous.

Imitosis is the full incarnation of a song on Weather Systems named simply "I". Is it true there were copyright issues that prevented the full version from appearing on Weather Systems?
Yeah, the version on Weather Systems is just something to bide my time while we worked that out. Musically that pizzicato pattern has just been so fertile for ideas over the past couple years. The song has been been morphing as I’ve been playing it live and I enjoy that feel so whether I got all the lyrics in there wasn’t that important.

And what was the issue with the lyrics?
It was based on a childhood memory of a skit from Sesame Street where these men live inside a capital I and they come out and they polish the I and they sing this song, which goes, “We all live in a capital I”. Instead of saying “We’re all basically alone” I would say “We all live in a capital I”, which is basically saying the same thing. There’s no other resemblance to the original Sesame Street version melodically or – beyond those lyrics – anything. But we went to Sesame Street and we said, “Hey, we’ve got this song, it’s based on a childhood memory of this skit.” And they led us along for a while and said, "Talk to our publisher, blah blah blah." And it took several years for them to say, “We don’t want to do this.” So instead of getting angry I just stayed up all night and rewrote the lyrics.

Your lyrics are so strangely evocative. A line [from the song Masterfade] like "You took my hand and led me down to watch a Kewpie doll parade" really makes me wonder what inspired it.
I wrote that one when I first moved out to my barn in the country. And I was trying to reconcile being in nature with also trying to set up a studio and struggling with technology. So I’d struggle with it and then go for long walks on the farm and I couldn’t separate the two. I kept seeing zeros and ones in everything. And also as with almost every song it’s not that simple, there’s several threads that go though it. I could also be talking about a relationship, you know. One person in a relationship has their finger on the master fade and can kind of control the reality of the other person with the fade dial. So there’s like three or four stories in that song.

What about “Thank God it’s fatal, not shy” [from the song Heretics]?
You know, that song is going along and talking about the damage we do to ourselves and whether we’re going to get credit for it in the end. The chorus takes it one step further. I felt like the song up to that point wasn’t really going balls-out enough lyrically. So there’s kind of a… I don’t know exactly what I was getting at with that but it’s something to do with seeing how you’re going to go. Are you going to torture yourself or are you going to go the extra mile and do it ‘til it kills you. It’s just trying to understand why we push ourselves. And how every show can feel like… It’s just weird how you can play 22 shows in a row and every night you’re just thinking, "I’ve got to play this set like I’m going to die tomorrow." Creating such hyper-romantic circumstances around something you do every day.

Spare-Ohs on the new album is inspired in part by something that happened to your chickens?
Yeah, I had 26 chickens and now I have zero chickens. I wasn’t able to keep the raccoons away from the chickens. And then for a year after that happened the chicken feathers are still around from the massacre. There’s just hundreds and hundreds of sparrows around my barn and they were taking the chicken feathers and stuffing my chimney with them to make nests. And then I would have a fire and I would see the smoke coming out and I would see little feathers reminding me of how I let down the chickens. And the whole line, “Don't speak about the cycles of life 'cause your thoughts are so soft I could cut 'em with a spork or a bride's knife.” The whole cycle of life thing was so apparent I was like, "Oh come on, this is just too obvious." Yeah, but then it also kind of talks about the implications of the cremations and the remains of animals and people floating and landing in our hair without us knowing it.

Dear Dirty has become one of my favorites in your repertoire. I was surprised it wasn’t on the album.
I was too. That one’s hard to explain, why that one didn’t end up on there. And I should just keep it mysterious, I think.

Have you been approached by any companies to license your music for advertising?
Sure. That happens a fair amount. And we consider each one. I’ve never said this publicly but when that car commercial comes around I’m going to have to say no. That’s where I’m going to have to draw the line. But Italian chewing gum? I’m okay with that. But car culture? I don’t to really contribute to that.

Whenever I'm going to do an interview I always scan the fan sites to see what people are obsessing over. In your case, there seems to be a lot of message-board curiosity about where you get your socks. There are entire threads about this, titled things like "Dude, where does Bird get his socks?!", "I will ask him at the San Francisco show, if I can, directly after I ask him to marry me!" And "I don't want him to think that I only love him for his socks." So are they custom made or would you rather that remain a mystery?
Sometimes people give them to me, which is nice. Who doesn’t need a new pair of socks? We’re actually working on making our own socks instead of T-shirts. But honestly the best socks I’ve ever found in the most colorful and interesting patterns are Paul Smith. They’re pricey but they’re pretty beautiful socks. But I mix it up, you know I wear Sock Monkey socks sometimes. Have you ever seen those Sock Monkey kits? They’re good socks! But onstage I have admit I do pay a little more attention to my sock wear.

Is there any particular place you like to visit in New York?
There’s a place in Red Hook called The Good Fork. It reminds me of a place in my neighborhood in Chicago called Oola. We just played Union Hall and I thought that was a pretty great place. I just like how much work they put into those glass cases. And then there’s a great vintage store called Rue Saint Denis on Avenue B… I know there’s something I’m missing.

What was the first gig you played in New York? Where was it and what do you recall about it?
This was probably like 1998, on our first tour we played a place called Dharma in the Lower East Side. They usually didn’t have music and we played in what was like a DJ booth.

With The Bowl of Fire?
We were all crammed in playing like 15 feet above the audience. And after that we just played Mercury Lounge six or seven times in a row.

Your performance on David Letterman was outstanding. How did you enjoy your late night television debut?
It was pretty nerve wracking. Like I was saying earlier. That was a very perilous song to do. It actually didn’t work right. The looping mechanism failed. And basically David Letterman’s saying, “And now for his network television debut, Andrew Bird!” And I didn’t have a guitar signal and I still had my winter coat on because it was so freezing. And it was just crazy circumstances to try and make music in. We lucked out that it worked. And afterwards the crew guys were saying, "You know what you gotta do, you gotta get like pro tools or some hard drive to play that! This is national television here, you can’t be doing that!” So we got a little lecture about our technique. It was pretty rough. And also to take a six minute song and make it three minutes was a challenge. But yeah, luckily my band is pretty equipped to deal with situations like that.

Photo of Andrew Bird at Bonnaroo from MyselfMyself.