Fresh Ears on Bird's 'Nervous Tic'

I don't necessarily consider pop or rock music that sounds somehow "classical" inherently better; quite often I feel the reverse. But there's no question that I'm often attracted to music that shows signs of having been composed, with layered lines and counterpoint-y stuff built into the architecture of the songcraft, as opposed to having been arranged as embellishment on top of the usual strophic chord, beat, and melody. You don't just hear this in the best prog rock or Dirty Projectors. I also hear compositional thinking behind tunes like Radiohead's "Airbag," Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots," Rufus Wainwright's "Matinee Idol," and Madison Cunningham's "L.A. (Looking Alive)," just to name a few.

It's probably no accident that Andrew Bird—classically schooled violinist, whistler, and erstwhile hot jazz bandleader—has contributed some fine specimens to this subspecies, a genre I hereby dub comp rock (I doubt this label will catch on, but who knows?). And among many contenders, I'd cite as Exhibit A his 2005 masterpiece "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left," from the record The Mysterious Production of Eggs. It's not just that the song has contrasting sections at various tempos, with a slow intro and outro framing the pulsing center; I'm not even sure it's just a matter of the evocative guitar/violin/whistle lines that swirl around the main melody, though that's closer to the mark. I think the song's "classical" feeling, the reason it sounds like a kind of tightly arranged, lightly electrified chamber music, may be a case of how these elements sound together, their harmonic and rhythmic profile.

The song's main hook—you might even call it a tic—is the six-note rough outline of an A-minor chord that sounds in both an instrumental (i.e., whistle) part and his main vocal. (It starts at :56 above.)

But how it's harmonized makes all the difference. It starts out in A-minor:

Hear how sweetly crunchy it sounds over a G-minor (with a different ending, obviously):

That's most of the song, actually. His vocal melody adds some grace notes and deviations along that outline, and the title chorus is an almost Sprechgesang affair that references just the first two notes of the figure. I haven't included the full chord progression, which is a kind of Andalusian cadence (it passes by E7 quickly but crucially en route back to the A-minor), or some of the threads of counter-melody that hold it together, or the pizzicato violin chords he uses as accompaniment. He embellishes it with many other voicings but this is the basic outline:

There's one other section, the bridge or pre-chorus, that really earns the song its keep. Breaking into a chorus of overdubbed vocals, which I won't try to reproduce in all their baroque parts here, he sings something like this (at around 1:39 above):

That's gorgeously thorny enough by itself. Then he throws in this delicious turnaround back the A-minor:
  

All this fine needlework supports an obscure but evocative lyric that seems to reference a near-death event, possibly drug-related, and link it to the indeterminacy and unlikelihood of our survival, possibly our very origin as a species. "You're what happens when two substances collide," is the answer of an "esteemed panel," presumably of scientists, on the History Channel, to the query, "Why are we alive?" There's some geographical funny business in relation to Midwestern locales with Platte in their name, an image of "16 tons of hazmat," a protagonist who seems to "want his life back."

In this context, the tight focus of the song's title line ("It's the nervous tic motion of the head to the left," with no clear antecedent for "it") has a clinical, almost diagnostic cool to it, like a short documentary clip of a convulsing patient played over and over; and yet it's also delivered with a certain tender quiet, even compassion. This is our shared predicament, it seems to be saying: We are all blips, products of heads jolting to one side and not the other. What "goes undelivered," we will never know, and that is our common tragedy.

On its most basic level, music is organized sound, and in that organization is meaning—even when the ostensible subject of a piece of music is chance, randomness, even seeming meaninglessness. Music binds us together in a shared temporal experience, providing its own answer to the question, "Why are we alive?"

One more note: This stunning live rendition from Bonnaroo in 2006 leaves a fair amount of the song and the arrangement on the cutting room floor, and gives a clue to its basis as a string loop (this is how Bird performed a lot of his early material). It also makes the Jeff Buckley connection a lot more strongly than I'd considered, particularly in the way he delivers the "undelivered" bridge.