This week’s “Music” feature offers an interview with Andrew Kenny, singer-songwriter-guitarist-bassist for the Austin/Brooklyn folk pop outfit The Wooden Birds. Kenny was born in Arlington and raised in Fort Worth. Back in the mid to late ‘90s, he earned an intensely loyal international following as the frontman for American Analog Set, which has variously been described as lo fi, slow core, drone pop, and shoe gaze. Suffice to say that just as The Wooden Birds’ music is ingenious and joyous (in a melancholy way), AmAnSet was meditative, langorous, and full of long instrumental passages.
Here’s the title track from The Wooden Birds’ new album Two Matchsticks complete with terrific animation by director Justin Goldwater. Last month the website Crawdaddy posted the second video tour diary from the Birds’ 2010 summer tour, which was directed and edited by Kenny. (You’ll see why he’s referred to as “the Ira Glass of indie rock”). Finally, here’s the offical video for “I Must Soon Quit the Scene,” a song from AmanSet’s 1999 album The Golden Band. To my mind, this tune demonstrates the dreamy, repetitive, not-quite-happy-not-quite-sad quality of AmAnSet at its best.
