In his first new single of 2022, Andrew Bird considers the words of Joan Didion and the proof that things fall apart…
In the late sixties, Joan Didion had a collection of essays published under the title ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem‘, which took its title from the poem “The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats. Didion’s observations dealt with societal fragmentation at a time of the counterculture height. In one essay, she says:
It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart: I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.
The counterculture that attracted the flower children from across America to Haight Ashbury wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. In her own words: “The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers.“
Atomization of society, and the self, gets brought up to date with Andrew Birds’ new single “Atomization”, his first new offering for 2022.
He sings: “Start making your apologies, blaming technology. They’re gonna try to get a rise to unseat you, they’ll demagnetize your poles and you know they’re gonna try to delete you…Here’s what I say to them: things fall apart.”
Talking about Didion’s essay and his song, he states, “Didion was updating W.B. Yeats for the fractious 60s. “This song takes it to the pixelated present where it’s not just society that is getting atomized but the self that is being broken apart and scattered.”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
W.B Yeats
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold…
Shot in black and white and directed by Matthew Daniel Siskin, the accompanying video is, by far, one of the coolest music videos I’ve seen this year, all helped along by the top-notch band of bassist Alan Hampton, drummer Abe Rounds and guitarist-producer Mike Viola. Siskin’s clever use of light and shadow, opposites, a tango of yin and yang…as things fall apart “demagnetize your poles“. With Bird pushed to the edge of sanity, it is the perfect playful depiction of the centre losing its hold…and the world carries on regardless…much like the hypnotic groove of the song.
It’s a monochromatic tour de force and also our Song of the Day.
Andrew will be performing the track this summer on his recently announced European Tour. Culminating at London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, July will see Andrew Bird play 7 nights over 9 days, including headline shows at Berlin’s Metropol, Utrecht’s Tivolivredenburg and Cologne’s Gloria, as well as performances with full orchestras at Day’s Off Festival in Paris and Lyon’s Les Nuits de Fourvières Festival. Full tour listing below. Tickets are on sale now at andrewbird.net/#tour.