Andrew Bird to celebrate 20-year anniversary of ‘The Mysterious Production of Eggs’ with CSO debut

Andrew Bird had a revelation at the premiere of “I Play Rocky” in Los Angeles in October. The new Peter Farrelly movie features the Lake Forest native’s original songs within the story of Sylvester Stallone’s fight to make his boxing saga against all odds.

Watching it unfold immediately brought Bird back to the challenges of his 2005 masterpiece, “Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs,” which marks its 20th anniversary this year. Festivities include two performances of the album in full at Chicago Symphony Center Nov. 13-14.

“I did start to see the parallels of coming to the point in your career where you really have to go through the gauntlet,” he said. “That was my ‘Rocky,’ I guess.”

Started in 2000, “The Mysterious Production of Eggs” was a Herculean effort that developed over an arduous five-year journey and three distinct stops and starts and came during a time of "immense change and personal challenge." In the beginning, Bird went so far as to abandon city life and build a studio in an 1890s barn his family owned in the northern Illinois village of Elizabeth to get perspective. As he tinkered away at the lush jazz-folk-pop album, his audience was farm chickens, raccoons and a random peacock that showed up at one point.

“It was really, really isolating, more than I expected,” he said of the sojourn. “I was 29 when this whole adventure started. … It was really a retreat from the canopy of trees and apartment buildings of the Chicago landscape and a bit from the Chicago music community at a time when people were saying you should think about going to New York or L.A.”

Back then, the classically trained violinist lived in Uptown, taking gigs at the Green Mill and Hideout and teaching classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music. He had already done stints with Squirrel Nut Zippers and established his acclaimed baroque pop group Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire (also featuring members like Nora O’Connor and Kevin O'Donnell).

But Bird wasn't feeling totally fulfilled and desired to retool his career. Doing so took a process of “trying to rewire my brain,” he said. “I had something in my head, and I wasn't sure how to get it yet … I kept thinking, I'm totally failing at this.”

Reuben Cox

A lot of it had to do with the formal way he was taught to play music, Bird said, starting with the Suzuki method when he was 4 years old. “[Teachers] were like, just follow the program, then you can do what you want. And I'm like, but I see so many people around me follow the program to the point where they've forgotten what it is to access that creativity and imagination and they lose it. I was just trying to hang on until I got away from the system and could do what I wanted.”

Like packing up everything and moving to the same barn where he and his brother used to build caves in the haystacks. Being back in the barn allowed Bird to tap into a similar childlike wonder where he relied on instinct and imagination. “It's the closest I've come to doing a concept album, but not intentionally,” Bird said. “I kept envisioning a [creator of “Where the Wild Things Are”] Maurice Sendak-type kid with the cape and wandering through this adult world that's trying to test and measure this kid and kind of squelch the childhood imagination.” That effect comes across in playful songs like "Opposite Day" and carries into the cartoonish artwork, by local illustrator Jay Ryan, which was expanded in a 20th anniversary box set and a new interactive website that explores not just the painstaking labor behind the album but also the rewards that came from it.

Eventually finished in L.A. with the help of producer Tony Berg and engineer David Boucher (and after a soft launch with the 2003 album “Weather Systems”), “The Mysterious Production of Eggs” became a hallmark of early millennium indie folk. Songs like the eclectic “Fake Palindromes” set a precedent for Bird’s 17 whimsical albums and wide-leaping composition work that followed, including pieces for FX comedy "Baskets," "The Muppets” and “The Pitt,” for which he won an Emmy in September.

The album also had one other big effect — it introduced his trademark whistling, a trick he first learned as a child from his grandmother.

“I remember going out in the ravines in Lake Bluff and trying to trick the birds into thinking that I was a bird. I would try to imitate their calls,” he said with a laugh. But the trick came in handy professionally around the time he started touring behind “The Mysterious Production of Eggs” as a proverbial one-man band, looping sounds to fill the gaps.

“As I went from like a five-piece band to solo around the turn of the century,” he said. “I found myself in a situation of having to engage the audience in any way and whatever I had to work with.” He would start the show appropriately with “First Song,” holding the track’s whistling intro as long as he could to get attention. And it worked. “You'd hear the chatter in the crowd just start to die down. Like, is that a smoke alarm? What is that?” he recalled. “The whistle is like glass that just cuts right through everything.”

Nowadays, Bird has been using flutes to help double that sound effect for “The Mysterious Production of Eggs” concerts. He reworked the songs into full orchestral arrangements with the help of Minneapolis-based composer Nathan Thatcher with the goal of performing the album with symphonies around the country. In Chicago, it marks a particularly special accomplishment — his debut with the CSO this month. “I was in the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, and I studied with Blair Milton, who was in the orchestra and at Northwestern [Bird’s alma mater]. So, this is kind of a big deal for me,” he said.

Reconfiguring the album into symphonic works admittedly “didn't take that much,” said Bird, who is among recent artists like St. Vincent and Billy Corgan to do so. “The album is already kind of orchestral in some ways. … it makes more sense than any other record.”

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He did enjoy adding new sounds that didn't appear on the original recordings like woodwinds such as the bassoon. “It was not something that was in my toolbox when I was making the album.”

Ultimately, Bird said, the experience of making “The Mysterious Production of Eggs” was key to everything he has done since then, even his annual Gezelligheid holiday concerts at Fourth Presbyterian Church. He’s skipping them this year in light of the two Symphony Center dates, but the event will return in 2027. “It had a massive effect on the way I hear music … and that sort of feedback between your environment and what you're playing," he said of one of the takeaways. Another one: “It was a big lesson about the best-laid plans … You have to learn to be more adaptable.”

Would Bird ever want to give up the polished studio work and the glamorous Hollywood projects to go back to that simple way of creating again? Maybe not. “My life is so different than it was then. … I think what I learned in that period is portable from this point on, and I can take it with me anywhere,” he said. “A sabbatical would be nice though.”