More Songs About Birding and Floods

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

-- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton"

Otherwise interesting people* -- presidential candidates of world historical importance, for instance -- often prove to have disappointingly pedestrian tastes in music.  On the other hand, musicians who have the good fortune to be interesting people* in their non-musical lives frequently make equally interesting music.  One such certainly is Jonathan Meiburg, leader of the band Shearwater, who when not writing, singing, recording, performing, etc., is a seriously well qualified ornithologist.

Birds, with much of the rest of the ancient and natural world, feature throughout Meiburg's work, from his band's seabird-derived name to song titles (e.g., "Fierce Little Lark") and album titles such as that of the freshly released Rook.

Musically, Rook picks up where the last Shearwater record, Palo Santo, left off.  I liked Palo Santo very much indeed back in 2006, but Rook is bidding fair to become an even bigger favorite.  Lyrically, Meiburg's songs remain steeped in the non-human parts of the natural world, but not in a sticky-sentimental way.  Perhaps I am only seeing this because I posted about him over the weekend, but there is something of William Blake running through many Shearwater songs: mankind as being in the world but not quite of it.  (Matador Records has posted the complete Rook lyrics [PDF, with sea monsters].)

Prior to the album's release, two officially sanctioned tracks were circulating fairly widely, including this vision of a planet suddenly and spontaneously unfeathered:

• Shearwater - Rooks [MP3]

On those same lines, Jonathan Meiburg's thoughts on the idea of the end of the world feature prominently in a Dallas Observer interview published today:

'I think the end of the world is mostly a fantasy that people have indulged in as a way of relief from what's actually going on, which is endless change without much of a beginning and without much of an end.  I think people long for an eschaton, some dramatic event that will end everything.  I don't think that's in fact what's gonna happen; I think things are just gonna keep changing.  And the record is, in some ways, a way of trying to address that and acknowledge that and, just for me, kind of come to terms with it.  Especially having worked on these studies in these really out-of-the-way places and seeing little brief glimpses of the world as it was before we were everywhere, eating everything.  And that world is almost gone, and it's gonna continue to disappear.'

Poof!

~~~

Also available: Five streaming selections from a mid-May Shearwater performance on the University of Minnesota's Radio K.  Of particular note is the song identified as "South Col," but which is not "South Col" (an instrumental) at all.  The song is actually "North Col," which otherwise appears only as a bonus track on the vinyl edition of Rook. The band's Radio K set also includes a fine performance of "The Snow Leopard," which with its perpetually-circling piano chord sequence is my current "first among equals" of Rook's songs.

Illustration: "Windswept rook" by Flickr! user foxypar4, used under Creative Commons license.

This post's title reference is explained, for all you young people, here.

~~~

*  No, I really can't use the phrase "interesting people" without immediately and reflexively thinking of this and this.  It's a generational thing, I think.