These 13 News Today

As origin stories go, you’d be hard-pressed to invent one like this: Andrew Bird first met Jimbo Mathus in 1994 at a North Carolina folk festival, while Bird was working—and this is true—as a medieval fiddler at a Renaissance fair in Wisconsin. Mathus managed to see beyond the doublet and breeches to the keen musician within, and soon Bird was contributing to albums by Mathus’ band, Squirrel Nut Zippers, the jazz and swing revivalists best known for their 1996 song “Hell.” This is n...

The two are close friends, and have developed an intensely creative approach to collaboration. New album These 13 is out in March, and it follows Andrew Birds Grammy nominated solo LP My Finest Work Yet. Andrew comments... "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 wal...