I'll be seeing Andrew Bird tonight at the Orpheum Theatre here in LA. (I saw The Dresden Dolls there and it's a nice venue, but it's Ticketmaster only which makes the tickets ridiculously expensive, I paid nearly the full price of the ticket itself in service charges, effectively doubling the cost of the ticket.) If you're there and want to give me any candy or cookies or drugs or something, just say hello.

The other day I mentioned thinking it's necessary to go back through albums you have previously enjoyed years ago looking for songs that you enjoy more now that your taste has developed in other directions. (I assume, I guess, that most people who would read staires_!_ are people who (like me) feverishly seek out new music constantly and consider their library and taste to be continuously developing.)

Although this album, Armchair Apocrypha, didn't come out that long ago (a month short of two years ago), somehow I totally overlooked this song on my repeated listens. The trio of Imitosis / Plasticities / Heretics got into my rotation but nothing else from the album. I don't know how, I guess I just wasn't that into the album at the time.

Perhaps it's the oddness of Bird's new album, Noble Beast, that makes me appreciate his previous album that much more. Noble Beast is largely devoid of songs that fall anywhere within the realm of traditional pop songwriting. Fitz & Dizzyspells comes as close as anything, but then immediately splits off into a bunch of linear sections that, despite being absolutely beautiful, completely ruin any sweet groove you were feeling. (This makes Noble Beast a particularly lousy driving album.)

Darkmatter's rather traditional sweeping epic indie pop song sound is a nice contrast to Noble Beast's peculiarities. But, maybe I'm doing the same thing with Noble Beast that I did with Armchair Apocrypha? Perhaps I am not listening to it right, and will, in a year or two, discover it anew and be amazed with it.

I'm hoping to expedite this process by seeing Bird live tonight. Generally seeing an artist live gives me an appreciation for material of theirs that I didn't like previously. It gives me a new angle in, like when I saw Rilo Kiley live years ago before they started to suck (this is a theme, you see) and suddenly More Adventurous made so much more sense. I guess we'll see. I suppose if I fall in love with Andrew Bird tonight, as in love as I am with other artists (Amanda Palmer, Eels, The Polyphonic Spree), I'll just post a song off Noble Beast tomorrow as well.

Twitter Note: Welcome new followers! If I followed you randomly, it's because I'm using Twollo to find people, like you, who are talking about "indie music". If you don't follow me back, I'll eventually unfollow you, so don't worry about it if you're not interested in my daily ramblings and music. I'm not selling anything but new experiences (oh lord) so you should hang around.

Site Note: I managed, finally, to add proper archive links since we're on Day 72 at this point. (Oh my god, I have to change the archive pages so they give a Day ## instead of the date! That'd be so awesome!) Let me know what you think, would it be better for archive pages just to be a list of all the posts in the month so you can pick and choose? Also, who here votes for a search box over in the sidebar somewhere?

Update: I did the whole "day ##" thing, you'll see it on single posts and archive pages. Pretty cool. I'll be adding a search box at some point today, I'll announce it on Twitter later when it's done.