Jimbo Mathus and Andrew Bird have today released ‘Poor Lost Souls,’ the latest single from their forthcoming album, These 13. The opening track addresses Hollywood’s homelessness crisis through two distinct points of view. On ‘Poor Lost Souls’ Mathus and Bird say, “Look down and see the stars, look up and see the gold. Here’s a broken song for broken times…but there’s hope in it.”
Out 5th March on Thirty Tigers, These 13 marks the first time in more than two decades that Mathus and Bird have joined forces for a collection of music. As former collaborators in Squirrel Nut Zippers they’ve known each other for over 25 years, but since the turn of the century they’ve grown accustomed to working apart, cultivating separate careers as solo artists and prolific songwriters.
On reconnecting with Jimbo for These 13, Andrew Bird says:
“Up until meeting Jimbo, all my musical heroes were dead. Jimbo was anything but and just oozed musicality of a kind I thought was extinct. Had I not met Jimbo, who knows, but I think my music would have gone on a much more cerebral, complex trajectory. He is an enigma, a walking contradiction: wild yet refined, worldly yet colloquial. He represents his own branch of the American musical tree. It’s been my dream for years now to make this record with Jimbo. Just guitar, fiddle and our very different voices. I wanted to make sure you can really hear him as if for the first time.”
On the roots of his relationship with Andrew, Jimbo Mathus adds:
“Musically speaking, Andrew challenged me early on. As I had the deep south rural musical upbringing but had yearned to know more of the Chicago and New York scenes of those early days of American popular music. Bird had schooled himself on that, absorbing the European strains of American music and theater, as well as the Chicago-based indigenous albeit transplanted African American musical heritage. It was a true mutual benefit society and we both pursued those goals to a final conclusion. At some point after Andrew had been on the road as ‘Bowl of Fire,’ he began mutating his music and creating an entirely new form. In other words, he started to become the artist he needed to be at that time and so did I.”
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