The Literary Inspiration Behind Andrew Bird’s New Single, ‘Atomized’

We’ve all likely felt a bit scattered lately, but there aren’t a lot of songs to soundtrack that.

Andrew Bird (photo by David Black)

But Andrew Bird has just the thing with his new single, “Atomized,” inspired by Joan Didion’s essays about the “atomization” of life in 1960s America, which she saw as a dark time in which society and she herself were falling apart. Didion was building on a famous line from the poet W. B. Yeats, who wrote in his World War I-era poem “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

Here in 2022, Bird finds pieces flying too, with technology taking the blame for pushing us apart and making it harder to find our humanity. (“Things fall apart” gets a plum spot in the lyrics of Bird’s “Atomized.”)

Bird’s latest solo album, My Finest Work Yet, came out in 2019 and was nominated for the Best Folk Album Grammy (ND review). In 2021, he released a duo album with former Squirrel Nut Zippers bandmate Jimbo Mathus called These 13 (ND interview). He made his acting debut in 2020 on the TV show Fargo and is on tour this summer with Iron & Wine.

Watch the video for “Atomized,” directed by Matthew Daniel Siskin and featuring Bird literally in pieces and operating in both dark and light, below.