Saw Andrew Bird last night, at the lovely Carolina Theater in Durham.

Augie March opened. They're an Australian band who do a roots-rock thing that reminded me of Ryan Adams: earnest, melodic, folk-based rock, but with an Aussie feel, instead of a southern U.S. feel. They weren't bad, but didn't really grab me.

Then, Bird came out and did a half-dozen songs by himself. Bird constructs his songs on stage by layering looped samples of violin and guitar then singing and playing lead over them. And he also sings those wonderfully clever lyrics with that great voice, whistles with such a strong clear tone that Mrs. Cleek compared it to a theremin, and he plays xylophone- all the while controlling the giant rotating speaker cabinet behind him and working the samplers with his feet to bring the sampled parts in and out at the right time. But, even that doesn't seem to be enough, and he gets his arms and legs into the music, too. Watching him, I got the feeling that even though he's doing six or seven parts by himself, he's still unable to get out all the music he's got going on in his head. And thankfully, instead of being a frantic mess, it's mesmerizing - genius at work. A second guitar player joined Bird for the second half of the set, adding another layer of guitar, or backing vocals, or keyboards here and there.

It was, as he said it would be after the first song, a mellow show. Bird doesn't have a ton of upbeat songs anyway, but he heavily favored the mellow ones last night. Since I generally prefer his livelier stuff, I wish he would've done a couple more of those. But, he did play "Nervous Tick Motion", and that means my life is nearly complete.

We had good seats for watching (except for the tall guy with the excellent posture directly in front of me), but not for picture taking... oh well. The sound was great.