Despite being on an ongoing tour to support his beautiful new album Songbread/Another Ocean, Bird By Snow (aka Fletcher M. Tucker) still managed to find time to answer some questions for I Am The Crime. So step into the interrogation room to see what he had to say about inspirations, nature, Sweden and – of course – music.

What originally inspired you to make music?
I didn’t start playing music until I was 17 or 18… which is pretty late I think. But I came to the process of making music from a background in visual art, which I have been invested in all my life. Recording music, and constructing a song or album reminded me of sculpture, revealing imagined spaces, sonic spaces and mind spaces, instead of physical space… it seemed like a natural new (to me) way to express certain ideas, and I saw the benefits of making work that existed in time, changed and traveled. Songs are fluid and can grow, I think that is what makes them particularly special, different than other art forms… they are made of breath, so they are living things. I make music because I want to contribute to the collective wisdom of mankind, simple as that.

The combination of your music and photos gives me the impression that nature plays a big part in what you create. Would that be a correct observation?
What isn’t nature, and how could its role in anything be diminished? Aren’t I nature? Isn’t this interview nature? Isn’t music nature? What, if anything seems more “natural” than music? It is true that non-human nature, and most particularly the Wild, are inspiring to me, mostly because I think the Wild is a great teacher, full of surprises within elegant systems of inter-connection. The Wild shows us that we are huge and tiny… insignificant, but part of a continuum… if you can really take that lesson in, I think your potential to be compassionate, fearless and creative grow and grow and never stop.

You seem to have a flurry of guest musicians. Ever considered narrowing it down and forming a “proper” band?
My friend Spencer Owen plays about half the music on all of the Bird By Snow records, and when I am lucky he performs live with me. We are the “band” on the records, basically co-arrangers on my tunes, so I am not in it alone exactly. I have played with a lot of different folks at live shows, and have had guests on the records, and I hope that never changes… because the band changes around me, the sounds do too, and so does the way I relate to the songs… and the songs continue to expand and change, become new again, and keep teaching me. Sometimes I even recruit a backing band from a band I happen to be playing a show with, and we have to figure out the songs together as we play them for the first time, and usually the last time… which means I can’t get attached, I can’t hold onto the new arrangements no matter how nice they sound, everything is a surprise in that moment only. I have done this a few times and it is always satisfying and
wonderful in different ways.

What led to you living here Sweden for a while?
I visited Denmark, Sweden and Norway in 2005, I was compelled by myths, and birch trees, and the Northern Lights, and by my ancestors. The whole area was romantic to me. I grew up in a small town in Northern California that has no distinguishable seasons, just cool fog all year long, but in the North the seasons change so dramatically, the land is so old, and the people who live there are affected by this old churning place whether they appreciate it or not. I wanted to feel that land, those dark days and long sunlit nights, snow and fjäll. In 2007 I toured in Europe twice, playing music, first a long long tour all over, and then again in just Scandinavia and Spain… I found myself pulled back to Sweden and its people, it is where I have met most of my close friends outside of the U.S. I also started to work with a label in Göteborg (Kning Disk) in 2007, which meant more reasons to perform and “spread the word” about Bird By Snow in Sweden. At the end of my second tour I fell in love with a woman in Stockholm, so I came back and lived with her for a while, then she moved south and I lived with her in Malmö… I studied Swedish briefly and walked the old land, sat in saunas, swam in the Baltic. There is more to see; more to uncover… I will be back soon.

Tell me about the song “My Life is Easy” – what are the intentions behind its lyrics?
My new record, which has that song on it, comes with a little book that contains the lyrics for every song and many other ideas that relate to each song. That song has the most lyrics of all the songs on the album, and I think it also has the longest explanation! But I will try to keep it under control here… the way you phrased this question is actually on-point with my philosophy of songwriting, because I think of songs as “intentions.” My intention by singing “my life is easy” is to sew my self generously into the fabric of the generous world! It isn’t a song about comfort, which I think it could obviously be misread as. It is not about the fact that I have always had enough food to eat, or a warm place to sleep, it would be cruel and ignorant to sing about comfort like that… there is hunger, sorrow, and oppression in the world, obviously there is work to be done. But a proclamation of “ease” is not a denial of that presence, it is a denial of dualism. My life is full of ease if I don’t separate the world or the events of my life into categories of good or bad, challenges or opportunities… it is one happening and, in my opinion, one celebration… My life is easy!

How would you describe the new album?
This new record plays around the idea of undoing separation. Seeing people, the earth, and ourselves as we are, which is as one… that’s an easy thing to say, so easy that it seems cheesy, even meaningless… but it is very difficult to put into practice, it takes practice, and some of my practices involve writing poetry and making music to undo separation. Within that literally all-encompassing idea there are also smaller currents of thought that connect the songs. Side A is mostly concerned with “nourishment,” and side B with “expansion.”

My relationship to these songs is different than on my other two records too, because I wrote almost every one of them on tour, and played them for two years before recording them. So before putting them on tape, I really “knew” them, we had been on long trips together already, and the songs hold very few secrets from me. On my first record (“Antlers and the Sun and All the Things that Grow old and Pass Away”) I actually wrote each song as I recorded it, kind of like multi-track improvisations. On “Sky,” my second LP, I wrote most of the songs like poems without any access to an instrument as I traveled, when I got home from my trip I sat down with an 8-track cassette machine and recorded every song pretty much in the order they appear on the record, finding the melody and instrumentation the day I recorded it. I am still learning the origin of some of those songs, still discovering connections in the words and tunes. The songs on “Songbread/Another Ocean” are more like old friends to me.

Sonically there is a lot of new stuff going on too, new sounds for me… tidal cellos, shimmering percussion, rolling piano, oceanic drones, expanding and contracting tape collages… and many many words, which all inevitably point back to the same simple idea: there is only one generous moment, everything else we just made-up.

What are you currently listening to?
I am pretty deep into the band Wolves in the Throne Room these days, they are a Black Metal band from Olympia Washington. They are my most recent beloved discovery. For the last couple years I have been obsessed with Tuvan music, particularly over-tone singing and the band Chrigilchin. I have also been mesmerized by Daniel Higgs, particularly his lyrical work, he is my current favorite lyricist and mystic. And I continue to adore a specific Robbie Basho album, “Voice of the Eagle,” which in my opinion contains the finest and most emotionally evocative singing ever put to tape. I am inspired by, and love to listen to my friends… Wildbirds and Peacedrums have a new record that is rad! And my buds Spencer Owen and Sean Smith both made records in 2008 that I am always ready to listen to (“Logic” and “Eternal,” respectively). My true favorite music is live music, so I am often at a show, being amazed.

~ Bird By Snow – “Domestic Freedom” ~