Andrew Bird's Are You Serious

I listened to Andrew Bird's Are You Serious a few times this month and found some things to write about.

"Capsized"

This is just a small point, but the various articulations of "falling" in the lines "Night's falling" and "Sky's falling" descend in pitch, so there's a musical falling to mirror the falling in the lyrics.  Sometimes, the "falling" is even sung with a melisma, which emphasizes the effect.

"Puma"

As written in the liner notes (which differ a bit from the song itself), the lyrics for one section are

When she was radioactive for seven days
How I wanted to be holding her anyway
But the doctors they told me to stay away
Due to flying neutrinos and
Gamma rays

The backing vocals harmonize with the lead vocals for the ends of the first two lines ("seven days" and "anyway") and then repeat the "ay" sound of the rhyme, so there's a musical representation of the half-life of radiation.  There's the initial "ay" sound in the lead vocals, and then it "decays" by moving to the backing vocals, where it "decays" even further by lowering in pitch (F# to E to D).  Perhaps significantly, this feature isn't present for the "ay" of "away" because the singer/speaker is "stay[ing] away" from the radioactive girl.

"Left Handed Kisses"

This is an-other small point, but there's a fairly large musical interval between the notes in "To us romantics out here that amounts to" and those in "high treason."  I think it's a fifth (A to E) between "that amounts to" and "high."  In any case, the high musical note emphasizes the notion of "high treason."

"Saints Preservus"

The first line is "I once was found but now I'm lost," which is an inversion of sorts of "I once was lost but now am found," a line from "Amazing Grace."

A later line is "Bring me your poor and your trembling masses," which is a near quote of Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus" (the poem written about and displayed in the Statue of Liberty).  In Lazarus' poem, the lines are "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

I think there might be a third allusion in the line "I'm a stranger in a land that's anything but strange."  It has a similar structure to a pair of lines in the folk song "Wayfaring Stranger" (here's a link to the song in Roger McGuinn's Folk Den).  Since it's a folk song, different versions of "Wayfaring Stranger" exist (including mine), but - as I'm familiar with it - the first two lines are "I am a poor wayfaring stranger / Wandering through this world of woe."

"Bellevue"

The album is bookended with nautical imagery, which is in both "Capsized" (the first song on the album) and "Bellevue" (the last track on the album).  The title line in "Capsized" is "This ship is capsized," but in "Bellevue," there's the line "Guides my lonely ships on through the shallows."  The images themselves are opposites, but they're drawn from the same pool, as it were.