What was the conceptual process for the Andrew Bird record packaging?
Andrew came to visit me at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History. I have been volunteering there for a couple years in the zoology department doing taxidermy on bird specimens. He had been working on the current album, and there were some natural history themes and imagery surfacing in some of the songs. He was particularly interested in the idea of microcosms; the world of organisms that you see when you look at the underside of a log or stone(mosses, lichens, beetles etc.), or through a microscope. We looked at some of the museum’s bird collections, toured the lab space, and the dermestid beetle room which is this room that has all these glass tanks full of dermestid beetle colonies that are used to clean skeletons. We discussed recurring forces and cycles in nature, such as growth and decay, water flowing over a waterfall, bird migration etc. Of course there are other themes that thread the songs on the album, but this was our main starting and connection point. The sort of ov
