‘Musicians drank too much and slept on my barn floor’: Andrew Bird on making cult album The Mysterious Production of Eggs
We had a family farm three hours west of Chicago, and when I was scoping out potential studio spaces I remembered some barns where my brother and I used to make forts out of hay bales when we were little.One was in rough shape and had racoons living in it, but I got a local carpenter to do the skilled jobs and I did the mundane stuff such as boards for the ceiling.Then I just moved in, but I hadn’t realised how isolating it would be.It was February and snowing and none of my friends had cars.I’d go for two weeks at a time without speaking to anyone.
So I started experimenting with a loop pedal, messing around with songs.I was playing all day and night in a kind of fever, throwing in pop, jazz, violin, guitars and polyrhythms, while wrestling with some demons.In junior high, I was not a normal thinker.I had been bullied and thought I was autistic, so I was unpacking all that in the songs.Sitting in Denny’s diner at 4am would produce some absurd humour: A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left is about a motion I adopted to shake off dark thoughts.
People must have thought I was crazy, sitting there shaking my head.Other songs on the album are about the commodification of genius as a marketing strategy, or warrior culture.With Fake Palindromes, I imagined a personal ad in a newspaper where someone puts innocuous details then slowly gets more subversive where they really want someone to perform trepanation on them.Bringing musicians to the barn to make the album proved overwhelming: people sleeping on the floor and drinking way too much.So I decamped to Nashville – making the album Weather Systems to let off some steam – and tried to record Eggs there, but that didn’t work either.
I was tearing my hair out, then jumping in my van with my gear and touring around Europe.A music bar owner in Chicago said: “Man, you really need to go to New York or LA.” And in LA, a producer pointed me towards a young engineer, David Boucher.Finally, after a weird, fanatical five years, recording with David and the musicians in a professional environment where people worked sane hours brought sanity to the album’s multiple styles, themes, layers and details.I was 29 and had been feeling like a has-been, but suddenly I felt like an artist, not someone just channelling my record collection.
The title comes from an old magic catalogue from the 1920s that said “the mystic production of eggs”.I changed “mystic” to “mysterious”, but it just seemed to capture the thrill of creating something that didn’t previously exist.The first time I went to the barn to visit Andrew, I drove until there were no other cars.Much later, when I read the story about Justin Vernon making the first Bon Iver album in a log cabin, I laughed and thought: “We did that, dude.” But it served Andrew’s music to start a record without the usual cacophony of life in the mix, although scrapping an album twice is very unusual.
In the barn, there were some really wild, intricate, orchestral, rocking sessions, but it didn’t sound like him.I said: “It’s like you’re wearing somebody else’s clothes.” Making Weather Systems in Nashville was partly an attempt to just get something out, because he didn’t have a record label and was dipping into his piggy bank or using his touring income to pay the band.Part of the reason for using the barn was that there was no rent.I went up there a handful of times and also visited him in Nashville and LA to see what was going on.
Playing the songs live throughout helped because he could get instant feedback on what worked and what didn’t.I took copious notes as we went through everything, trying to piece together the parts that were worth hanging on to and encourage him not to quit until he felt that it was done.I must have 100 burned CDs of Eggs with various versions of songs and sequences of tracks before we settled on the finished version.He had come up with something that people found hard to compare, because it wasn’t another version of someone else’s thing.It felt very exciting when people loved it.
Andrew Bird and Britten Sinfonia’s 20th anniversary performance of The Mysterious Production of Eggs is at the Barbican, London, on 28 February
‘People yearn for stability’: the Thames Water sewage plant at frontline of its crisis
It is a grey day in a wet week but one of Thames Water’s neglected plants is still coping. Wastewater is being pumped into the vast Maple Lodge sewage treatment centre in Rickmansworth, just off the M25, at a rate of about 3,000 litres a second, within capacity.The site manager points out the first-line screens that catch everything that will not pass through a 5mm filter. A “sheep” – a bundle of wet wipes, sanitary pads, cotton buds, condoms and indigestible bits of sweetcorn – is rotating at one edge. Credit cards and false teeth have been known to end up here
Criminals ‘systematically’ targeting UK shops, costing £400m last year, say retailers
Criminal gangs are “systematically” targeting shops, retailers have warned, with 5.5m incidents of shoplifting detected last year, costing the industry an estimated £400m.The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has warned over “endemic” violence towards shop workers – who faced an average 36 incidents of violence involving a weapon every day last year – and said high levels of theft was causing “anxiety” among retail staff.Helen Dickinson, the chief executive of the BRC, called on police to consistently prioritise tackling retail crime and commit “dedicated resourcing” to the problem.The BRC research comes after the government put forward new legislation to back a stand-alone offence for assaulting a retail worker and to remove a £200 threshold for “low level” theft, which has a maximum six-month custodial sentence
Crypto exchange Binance may have funded Iranian entities, reports say
Shortly after Donald Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, last fall, company employees revealed the cryptocurrency exchange may have funded Iranian entities with billions of dollars, according to a report by the New York Times.The discovery was made by a group of internal Binance investigators, who reportedly found that people in Iran had accessed more than 1,500 accounts on the crypto platform. Two of those accounts allegedly saw $1.7bn move to Iranian-backed groups that included Yemen’s Houthi militants throughout 2024 and 2025, according to the Wall Street Journal.The company investigators say they reported those transactions to Binance’s executives, but then were reportedly disciplined
Progress on gender equality at top of UK’s biggest firms ‘achingly slow’
Campaigners have bemoaned the “achingly slow” progress made on gender equality at the top of Britain’s biggest businesses, as research showed blue-chip firms had missed key targets and there were only nine female bosses at FTSE 100 companies.The average number of female FTSE 100 chief executives did not move last year, according to the government-backed FTSE Women Leaders Review.They were Allison Kirkby at BT, Zoë Yujnovich at National Grid, Milena Mondini de Focatiis at Admiral, Stella David at Entain, Louise Beardmore at United Utilities, Margherita Della Valle at Vodafone, Amanda Blanc at Aviva and Cindy Rose at WPP.The report also considered Emma Walmsley at GSK and Liv Garfield at Severn Trent, although both women left their roles in December, as well as Carol Howe, the interim chief executive of BP, who is due to be replaced by Meg O’Neill in April.Debra Crew left the drinks group Diageo last summer after two years in which the company’s share price dropped more than 40%
Trump threatens ‘more powerful and obnoxious’ tariffs, amid confusion in UK and EU; Wall Street drops – as it happened
Donald Trump has declared that he can use tariffs in a ‘much more powerful and obnoxious way’ than he has thus far.Posting on his Truth Social network, the US president again attacked the supreme court for ruling against his sweeping global tariffs last Friday – calling them ‘incompetent’.He also claims the justices have ‘‘accidentally and unwittingly’ expanded his presidential powers on tariffs.Trump writes:double quotation markThe supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!*) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling.For one thing, I can use Licenses to do absolutely “terrible” things to foreign countries, especially those countries that have been RIPPING US OFF for many decades, but incomprehensibly, according to the ruling, can’t charge them a License fee - BUT ALL LICENSES CHARGE FEES, why can’t the United States do so? You do a license to get a fee! The opinion doesn’t explain that, but I know the answer! The court has also approved all other Tariffs, of which there are many, and they can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used
Stock markets stumble as global trade faces more Trump tariff uncertainty
Stock markets stumbled on Monday as Donald Trump pushed ahead with fresh tariffs on the US’s trading partners despite a supreme court strike-down and growing opposition from domestic voters.Uncertainty over the status of global trade deals spooked investors, triggering a drop in US shares prices including on the Dow Jones industrial average, which tumbled 1.6% by Monday’s closing. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 fell 1.4% and 1
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From Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die to Tracey Emin: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead