Andrew Bird
Orpheum The­atre (Boston)
30 Jan­u­ary 2009

After a luke­warm but warmly-received open­ing by the Swedish indie-folk group Lonely Dear, amidst a con­stant shuf­fle of activ­ity to and from the bath­room (blame the $10 cups of Har­poon IPA!), Andrew Bird appeared alone on stage wear­ing a dark suit. He played a few notes on the vio­lin, or per­haps even a whole tune—I don’t remember—but he earned his sec­ond round of applause when he leaned down to untie his shoes. Those bright red socks must be the source of his musi­cal powers.

Boston was stop num­ber two on the Noble Beast tour. Some of the num­bers were a lit­tle rough around the edges, with sev­eral false starts, tun­ing prob­lems, and fre­quent on-stage appear­ances by a tracksuit-clad gui­tar tech. Bird, ever the per­fec­tion­ist, apol­o­gized if it seemed that the band was “play­ing stick­ball in a sand­lot,” but nobody minded at all. The show sim­ply rocked.

The con­cert cli­maxed at the first encore, when Bird re-appeared alone to pluck, bow, and wail his way through a com­plex and dra­matic live ver­sion of “Why?” The muse had clearly pos­sessed him: his vio­lin exuded vir­tu­os­ity and his pipes became inex­plic­a­bly cal­i­brated to deliver a max­i­mum of raw emo­tion. The audi­ence was on their feet and the air was electric—boisterous men stood mostly silent, lan­guid women swayed, and a few girls near the front of the house inter­jected screams like they were on the brink of rip­ping their clothes off.

Ver­dict: see it if you can.