Andrew Bird's Highflying Folk

Bird's rise has been slow and not exactly steady. The son of an artist and art-therapist mother and a father who worked in finance, Bird grew up in a Chicago suburb, a few blocks from Lake Michigan. He was a loud kid who sang for strangers he met in elevators — until age five, when he suddenly became very quiet. His shyness landed him in special education. "I was put in super-remedial classes with troubled kids, even though I was reading at a high level," Bird says. Music was an outlet. He studied violin and ended up with a music scholarship to Northwestern University.

Bird took on random gigs after graduating. He played with the retro-swing band Squirrel Nut Zippers at the time of their 1997 hit single "Hell" and took a job as a knave fiddle player at a Wisconsin renaissance fair, where he dressed in a floppy hat and blousy shirt and played jigs and reels for Dungeons & Dragons fans waiting to use the bathroom. Inspired by folk, jazz and swing records, he formed Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire in 1997.

Bird made three jazz-influenced albums with Bowl of Fire, but by 2002 the band was playing to dwindling crowds. Bird responded by breaking up the group and adopting what he calls "guerrilla tactics" — acting as a one-man touring operation. He did solo gigs with My Morning Jacket, Ani DiFranco and loads of other artists. After the shows he would run his own merchandise booth.

The shows highlighted Bird's uniqueness: He would often begin a set by filling his lungs with air and holding a long whistled note until the crowd stopped talking and paid attention. Once they did, they saw a guy singing strangely pretty folk tunes while handling a violin, a guitar, a glockenspiel and a looping machine. Still, the solo tours were a grind: Bird would pull hairs out of his legs to stay awake. "One time I fell on my ass at a pub in Newcastle," says Bird, who nowadays performs both solo and backed by two bandmates. "I was just too tired to stand."

Around that time, Bird moved from Chicago to his family's farm in rural Illinois. There, while taking time off from touring, he recorded two solo albums. "I read about all these artists in Paris getting their little country studio," says Bird. "I didn't want to be just another urban-dwelling twentysomething." By the time he made 2003's Weather Systems, he had stumbled onto his signature sound — orchestral folk spiked with touches of Latin swing and other left-field elements. "I hear glimpses of tango, Debussy and Radiohead in Andrew's music," says Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche. "But he's got his own voice."