Andrew Bird and Jimbo have announced a new album, These 13, out on March 5 via Thirty Tigers. As longtime friends and former collaborators in Squirrel Nut Zippers, this is the duo’s first shared musical project in decades. These 13 was produced by Mike Viola and recorded live to tape. The first half of the album was recorded in early 2019, while the second half was finished in early 2020. Today, they’ve also shared the album’s lead single, “Sweet Oblivion,” alongside an accompanying video that sees the two-piece perform outside the mountains of Ojai.
Bird said of their new project:
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 walking contradiction: wild yet refined, worldly yet colloquial. He represents his own branch of the American musical tree. It’s been my dream for years now to make this record with Jimbo. Just guitar, fiddle and our very different voices. I wanted to make sure you can really hear him as if for the first time.
Watch the video for “Sweet Oblivion” and a clip from Bird’s 2007 Daytrotter session below. Scroll down for the album artwork and tracklist, and preorder These 13 here.
These 13 Album Artwork:
These 13 Tracklist:
01. Poor Lost Souls
02. Sweet Oblivion
03. Encircle My Love
04. Beat Still My Heart
05. Red Velvet Rope
06. High John
07. Stonewall (1863)
08. Bright Sunny South
10. Bell Witch
11. Dig Up the Hatchet
12. Jack O’ Diamonds
13. Burn the Honky Tonk
14. Three White Horses and a Golden Chain
