Andrew Bird's "Are You Serious"

This morning I listened to Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire's Oh! The Grandeur, and I think I found an-other instance of Bird's borrowing from his past work (when I listened to Oh! The Grandeur last Collection Audit, I discovered that he reworkt "The Confession" into "The Privateers" on Noble Beast).  The pizzicato part that starts "Feetlips" sounds a lot like the pizzicato part that starts the title track of Are You Serious.  I spent a bit of time trying to figure out the parts, and while I'm not super confident in what I came up with, I think they're something like this:

"Feetlips":

"Are You Serious":

In the same rhythm, there's a two-octave jump, then down a sixth, up a third, and down a fifth.  Aside from the initial note, that phrase is repeated in "Feetlips," but the "Are You Serious" part continues descending in a skipping manner.

I should mention that I don't actually have Are You Serious yet.  I listened to it when it was on NPR's First Listen, but I've become familiar with the songs via Bird's radio appearances.  I figured out (or tried to figure out) the part in "Are You Serious" based on this performance on KFUV.

Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire's Thrills

I just listened to Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire's Thrills, and - like I did back in March and in August - I found some lyrics that Andrew Bird later re-used.

The line "two sure fatal doses of malcontent through osmosis" (or at least I think those are the words) in "Eugene" also appears as "sure fatal doses, malcontent through osmosis" near the end of "Imitosis" on Armchair Apocrypha.

"Cock O' the Walk" contains the line "took the 4:50 Addison to see Pulaski at night," and I Want to See Pulaski at Night was the title of Bird's EP from 2013.

Additionally, "a dog with a nasal disease" from "Nuthinduan Waltz" seems to be a precedent for "a wolf with a lung disease" from "Natural Disaster" on Noble Beast.

Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire's "The Confession"

I just listened to Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire's Oh! The Grandeur.  I can't remember if I knew this or not, but I discovered that he (Andrew Bird) later adapted "The Confession" from Oh! The Grandeur into "The Privateers" on Noble Beast, which I listened to just two days ago.

A good deal of the adaption is just in the musical style of the two songs.  "The Confession" is slower than "The Privateers" and has a bit of the jazziness that's present on a lot of the other Bowl of Fire songs, where "The Privateers" is faster and has more of an acoustic and ambient sound, in fitting with the other Noble Beast songs.

But there are also some lyrical changes.  "The Privateers" reorders some of the lyrics and shortens the last two verses.  The only major changes I can find are inserting "flood" into the types of insurance ("I don't want your life insurance / Home, auto, health, flood, and fire insurance"), substituting the line "And speak of me in the present tense" for "And employ a little common sense" in "The Confession," and substituting "profiteer" for "privateer" in the last verse of "The Privateers."

Andrew Bird's "Lazy Projector"

I listened to Andrew Bird’s Break It Yourself this morning, and in “Lazy Projector,” I noticed a reference to his earlier work.

In “Lazy Projector,” he says, “history repeats itself / and time is a crooked bow.”  ”Time is a crooked bow” is also a line that appears in “Armchairs” from Armchair Apocrypha.  Judging by “history repeats itself,” this was a conscious self-reference.

Some of the melody of the later part of “Lazy Projector” sounds like it’s echoing his earlier work too, but I can’t quite place it, so I don’t know if it actually is similar to an earlier melody or whether it’s just so quintessentially Andrew Bird-sounding.