Musician Andrew Bird on the Fine Arts Building, Chicago

The Fine Arts Building in Chicago is on Michigan Avenue downtown and it’s this Beaux-Arts high-rise building that, when I was in high school, and I got into the Chicago Youth Symphony, I would go down on weekends to play in the symphony. And it hasn’t changed at all over the decades. You know, they’ve got these ancient elevators with elevator operators. You’ve got ballet on one floor. You’ve got a bookshop on another floor. You’ve got all the violin shops, you know, various violin dealers and repair shops. When I would go into Bein & Fushi, which is, like, the violin shop, and you wanna try, like, a bow or something, or a violin, you use these rooms that are overlooking Lake Michigan. And they have these, like, skylights everywhere. Very odd-shaped rooms, and… It’s just full of… The place is just full of mystery, I mean, and these Beaux-Arts murals everywhere, and it’s just kind of musty, and the smell of violin varnish. But I would mostly, I would drive down when I was in high school after, like, a long week of doing soccer and, and just, you know, a heavy schedule, and then I would drive down in my old Buick, and I’d be so exhausted. I was trying to stay awake. And I remember one time, my radio in my Buick was broken, so I was just trying to get some kind of stimulus ’cause I was starting to fall asleep, and I was just listening to static on the radio, really loud, like, ear-bleeding loud just to not fall asleep. And then I got out of the car in the parking garage, and I found myself making this “pffffffff” sound, ’cause I, you know every time I hear a tune, I whistle it, if it’s good, you know? Or maybe not if it’s good, and evidence that this static, ’cause I was… It was a weird moment when I was, like, I was just repeating what I had just heard, which was complete noise. Then I entered the Fine Arts Building, and it was just the beginning, when I would go there, it was just the beginning of when I was, kind of getting swept up in the romance of, like, being a virtuosic violinist.