• News

• All

Jan 12, 2021 By Joey Arnone Jimbo Mathus

Jimbo Mathus and Andrew Bird have announced a new album, These 13, and shared a video for “Sweet Oblivion,” the lead single from the album. Both Mathus and Bird were in Squirrel Nut Zippers together in the late ’90s and this is their first collaboration in decades. These 13 will be out on March 5 via Thirty Tigers. Check out the video, as well as the cover art and tracklist for These 13, below.

Bird had this to say about his musical partner in a press release: “Up until meeting Jimbo, all my musical heroes were dead. Jimbo was anything but and just oozed musicality of a kind I thought was extinct. Had I not met Jimbo, who knows, but I think my music would have gone on a much more cerebral, complex trajectory. He is an enigma, a walking contradiction: wild yet refined, worldly yet colloquial. He represents his own branch of the American musical tree. It’s been my dream for years now to make this record with Jimbo. Just guitar, fiddle and our very different voices. I wanted to make sure you can really hear him as if for the first time.”

Mathus also spoke of his collaboration with Bird in the press release: “Musically speaking, Andrew challenged me early on. As I had the deep south rural musical upbringing but had yearned to know more of the Chicago and New York scenes of those early days of American popular music. Bird had schooled himself on that, absorbing the European strains of American music and theater, as well as the Chicago-based indigenous albeit transplanted African American musical heritage. It was a true mutual benefit society and we both pursued those goals to a final conclusion. At some point after Andrew had been on the road as ‘Bowl of Fire,’ he began mutating his music and creating an entirely new form. In other words, he started to become the artist he needed to be at that time and so did I.”

Last month, Bird held his annual Gezelligheid concert as a livestream event. Bird’s latest album was 2019’s My Finest Work Yet. Back in April of last year, Bird shared a new song, “Capital Crimes,” via a video for the track. The song was about capital punishment and was one of our Songs of the Week.

Read our interview with Andrew Bird on My Finest Work Yet.

These 13 Tracklist:

1. Poor Lost Souls
2. Sweet Oblivion
3. Encircle My Love
4. Beat Still My Heart
5. Red Velvet Rope
6. High John
7. Stonewall (1863)
8. Bright Sunny South
9. Bell Witch
10. Dig Up the Hatchet
11. Jack O’ Diamonds
12. Burn the Honky Tonk
13. Three White Horses and a Golden Chain

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.