Andrew Bird's migration

It's odd enough how Andrew Bird famously can sound like a whole band all on his own. Even weirder, though, was the brave way he disregarded the tools of the trade when he did get around to hiring a new band, choosing two guys from Minneapolis. "When I first heard Martin [Dosh]'s music, I didn't even think of him as a drummer," the cult-loved Chicago musicmaker said of his drummer and main collaborator of late. "I was fascinated by everything else he did." As for new bassist Jeremy Ylvisaker, he said, "I didn't know whether or not Jeremy even played bass. I saw him play guitar with Redstart and knew he had to be a solid, well-rounded musician."

Talking to Bird by phone as his tour bus lumbered through Los Angeles traffic last week, he sounded downright braggadocious about having a Minneapolis crew with him.

In addition to Dosh and Ylvisaker -- "I think they're awake, if you want to talk to them" -- his Minneapolitan manager Andrea Troolin was also aboard. Troolin's the one who introduced the cultish Chicago musicmaker to the Twin Cities' thriving and innovative scene a few years back.

With last month's release of his best album in a decade-long career, the haunting but playful opus "Armchair Apocrypha," Bird is the one who's now talking up our town.

"Every time I'm there, I feel very stimulated," he said, "from the people I meet to the bands I catch to the things I see."

Not only did Bird hire Dosh and Ylvisaker from the Twin Cities, but he recorded most of the new album here. Working over a yearlong stretch a week or so at a time, he used a supporting cast of local players that also included co-producer Ben Durrant (who was in Lateduster with Dosh and Ylvisaker), engineer Tom Herbers, backup singer Haley Bonar and bassist Chris Morrissey.

As Bird explained it, making the album in Minneapolis had as much to do with the talent here as it did with finding a change of scenery.

A classically trained musician and onetime member of the retro-swinging '90s band Squirrel Nut Zippers, Bird has a lot of experience in restarts. Even during the performance of a single song, he's liable to switch from violin (his principal instrument) to xylophone to guitar, or from his Thom Yorke-ian style of singing to his weirdly virtuosic whistling.
Bird left the Zippers just as the fame from their 1997 hit "Hell" started to fade. ("To go from a classical background to that band really schooled me in the show," he said.) He continued to play jazzy, old-timey music through the first few Rykodisc albums by his own band, Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire. But with the 2003 album "Weather Systems," things started to get weird. In a good way.

Bird moved from Chicago to a farm that his parents own in northern Illinois, where he started to experiment with sequencers (tape loops), allowing him to create layers of instrumentations all on his own.

"I went through a lot of self-doubt and suffering working out there, but I work well that way," he said. "Every time I make a record, it has to hurt."

By the making of his last album "Mysterious Production of Eggs" in 2004, Bird had signed to Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe label, and his solo shows had become as strange and multifaceted as his recordings.

On "Armchair Apocrypha," his wild, loop-addled use of strings, keyboards, polyrhythmic drum tracks, understated guitar work and willowy whistling all sounds less like experimentation and more like a well-honed soundtrack. Maybe because the music came easier, Bird also shines more as a singer and lyricist.