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REDBIRD is both the name of an album and of a loose affiliation of four American songwriters that began to take shape during a common tour experience. In early 2003, KRIS DELMHORST, JEFFREY FOUCAULT, and PETER MULVEY toured together in England as an Americana triple-bill. England is a small country and the drives were not long, and it developed that in the afternoons after checking into their hotel rooms they’d pull up chairs, plug in the electric tea kettle, uncase their guitars, and start playing songs. Any song, if it was good, and they hadn’t already played it, and they knew the first few lines. Old or new songs, written by other people mostly, jazz ballads or country crooners, blues or Bowie, the Beatles or anything else, all the late greats and plenty of neither, anything as long as it had the right spirit. Something like a poker game played without hard money, and everyone pushing their little pile of strange coins and trinkets, pocket knife or compass, to the middle of the table to be reckoned.
Over the course of the tour they started playing on each other’s sets and ending the shows together. They started drinking cheap Porto and playing poker late at night. They got awfully friendly, and some of them married each other.
On returning to the states they decided they wanted to go back to England again on a longer tour, and perhaps go to Ireland as well. They decided they wanted to do away with the triple bill format, and bring David Goodrich to play lead. They decided they wanted cheap Christmas gifts for their friends and family. On an impulse of rare genius they decided to make a record.
Now, Redbird isn’t a band. It’s more like a treehouse, or maybe like Andy Griffith’s front porch in Mayberry: smiling white people trading old tunes on flat-top guitars, people who probably just ate a really good supper and one of them is hiding a pint of something behind a chair leg. Also, where in a band there are various members who play different instruments well while performing mostly original material, with Redbird there are four guitar players with distinct careers and catalogues, who play mainly other peoples tunes without trying to play them very well, but mostly just to keep the conversation going. Sometimes Kris plays the fiddle, but not on purpose, and she denies it afterword. It’s less interpretation and more dialectic. Like a comparative literature seminar, with beer.
The album they made reflects these things. Each of them brought a handful of songs to the table, and they swung at each one in turn. In a few takes they’d either caught it or hadn’t, and they moved on. They recorded about 45 songs around one old AKG canister microphone, with no mixing but just the whole room live to crickets and lawnmowers and Mormon missionaries knocking on the front door. They passed the instruments around, drank beer, grilled bratwurst (they were recording in Wisconsin), and traded tunes for a few days and nights in the middle of August.
The resulting 17 tracks blur the lines between jazz, country, public domain songs, and songs by friends and contemporaries into a series of snapshots, each song as it happened, nothing added or subtracted. If Redbird isn’t a band, neither is this an album in the traditional sense, though it can be fairly called a record; a series of songs caught, culled, and pressed. Unambitious and low-fi, Redbird is long on charm and low on polish, and falls somewhere between field recording and house party, Christmas gift and bootleg.
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