Andrew Bird delivers the brand new holiday album Hark! Building upon last year’s EP of the same name, the 13-song set delivers freshly recorded originals – including “Christmas in April,” perhaps the first COVID-inspired holiday song, which Andrew wrote during lockdown (“when will we know/if we can meet under the mistletoe?”) – plus holiday classics and wintertime re-imaginings of seasonally ambiguous deep cuts by John Cale, John Prine and Handsome Family. For the first time since 2002’s Ballad of the Red Shoes, Bird collaborated on the album artwork with his mother, who was also the inspiration for Hark!’s exquisite, solo violin arrangement of “Mille Cherubini in Coro” – her favorite piece from the Pavarotti and Vienna Boys Choir performance she and Andrew would always listen to when he was a child.

“Let’s not talk about the dubious motives that might lead an artist to make a holiday record,” Bird says. “It’s a complicated relationship many of us have with the holidays and the requisite music we hear. So let’s admit that it’s a utilitarian thing. The music is just one contributing factor to our communal or solitary joy and melancholy. As a musician, it’s an excuse to take a break from writing the next record and indulge in an unapologetically nostalgic exercise. I’ve done my best to find some lesser known gems. A passing reference to wintertime sentiment is all it takes to make the cut on Hark! A mention of snow falling in John Cale’s “Andalucia,” a namecheck of Christmas in John Prine’s “Souvenirs” or as the setting of the drunken fiasco in the Handsome Family’s “So Much Wine,” remade as “Greenwine.”

“There’s an original tune I wrote in April during the most disorienting phase of the pandemic, when I couldn’t help but wonder where we’ll be when the holidays come, if we could be together or not,” he adds. “I’ve been writing a lot of songs inspired by this uninspiring predicament. Let’s hope they all become obsolete as soon as possible. Anyway, I hope you enjoy Hark! And that it underscores better times.”