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This Friday, October 30th, Andrew Bird will release his debut holiday album, HARK!(Loma Vista Recordings), and today he shares what may very well be the world's first-ever COVID-inspired Christmas song. Written at home in Los Angeles during the pandemic's most disorienting phase this spring, "Christmas in April" wonders where we will be - physically, spiritually - when the holidays come around this year. Over a warm, waltzing arrangement of acoustic guitar and whistling leads, Bird's melodies capture the melancholy that'll soon be fueling fireplaces, when we too start asking, "When will we know if we can meet under the mistletoe?"
Listen to "Christmas in April" here: https://found.ee/AB_ChristmasInApril
Watch a brand new live rendition here: https://found.ee/AB_CIAVideo
Learn more about the song at Rolling Stone, where Andrew revisits its origins and talks about finding joy in an inevitably somber season. On the writing and increased relevance of "Christmas in April," he says:
"There were those various stages of acceptance we all went through at first while our brains tried to process how disruptive COVID would be (remember when we thought it would be 2 weeks?). By April I was looking ahead to the holidays and wondering if/when I'd see my folks, knowing that there were millions of people thinking the same thing. Those kinds of universally shared moments are rare in this fractured world."
In addition to "Christmas in April," HARK! includes originals like "Alabaster" and "Night's Falling," new takes on such classics as Vince Guaraldi Trio's "Christmas is Coming" and "Skating," "White Christmas," "Auld Lang Syne" and more, as well as wintertime reimaginings of hidden gems by John Cale, John Prine and The Handsome Family. For the first time since 2002's Ballad of the Red Shoes, Andrew collaborated on the album artwork with his mother, Beth Bird, who inspired HARK!'s version of "Mille Cherubini in Coro" - her favorite piece from the Pavarotti and Vienna Boys Choir performance she and Andrew would listen to when he was a child.
Watch the surreal, animated music video for the HARK! interpretation of John Cale's "Andalucia," and see Andrew perform it with bandmate Alan Hampton as the encore for this month's 15th Anniversary live-stream of The Mysterious Production of Eggs: https://found.ee/AB_AndaluciaLive
On November 20th, HARK! will be released as a limited edition LP. The red colored vinyl will be housed in a special gatefold jacket that includes perforated paper sheet inserts of 12 birds that fans can hang as ornaments. Pre-order the package here.
For more on how "Andrew Bird made a Christmas album for the rest of us," read his recent interview with Billboard, discussing the decisions behind the track listing, why he brought John Prine's "Souvenirs" into the holiday lexicon, and some of the brutally honest songs he wrote that didn't make the cut.
Throughout the fall Andrew has been starring as the breakout character Thurman Smutny in the latest chapter of FX limited series Fargo. Watch his cliff-hanger scenewith Chris Rock from one of the earlier episodes.
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