For the Birds: Shearwater Frontman Drops Some Science

On a warm February day in South Carolina, Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg embarks on a bird-spotting stroll through the Audubon Swamp Garden at Magnolia Plantation—the same swamp John James Audubon visited 150 years ago on his quest to document every species of bird in America, and the same swamp where Wes Craven filmed his 1982 cult classic Swamp Thing.

Meiburg walks in armed with a pair of binoculars, a Sibley Guide to Birds and a digital recorder, ready for whatever creatures cross his path. He’s also brought his vast knowledge of the avian world. Meiburg loves birds—not in the way your grandmother loves the birds that flit around her backyard feeder, but in a master’s-thesis-on-the-striated-caracara kind of way.

“People always ask me, ‘How does studying birds affects your music?’” Meiburg says, gazing at a duckweed-topped lagoon where dozens of alligators are warming their blood on specially built platforms. “It’s hard to answer that, because the degree that it does is so abstract, and yet I can tell you that it has a lot to do with—my life, and how I look at things, and I think that expressing some of those experiences, um...”

Suddenly, Meiburg rears back his cowboy boot and kicks out a chunk of trailside anthill. “Fire ants, I think,” he says. “It’s so fun to watch them reeling. Look at ’em go!”

Meiburg’s scientific detachment belies the years he spent in Episcopalian vestries honing his breathy, choirboy tenor, which—on Shearwater’s previous album Palo Santo and this year’s exceptional Rook—shifts from delicate to menacing in the time it takes to destroy an ant colony.

A pair of great egrets passes overhead, crying in guttural tones. “That’s weird, usually they’re silent,” Meiburg says, aiming his binoculars at the elegant, long-legged fliers. “Those birds don’t sing—that order of birds, the songbirds, is the biggest, but it’s not the oldest. These older birds make screaming noises, squawking and broken.”

Meiburg has participated in studies in Tierra del Fuego, Madagascar, the Galapagos and, most recently, the Falkland Islands, where the ideas for Rook germinated. “It’s a hard time for nature,” he says on the walk back to the parking lot. “Right now there’s this sort of feeling in the zeitgeist that we’re doomed. I don’t know that I want to be just another voice to that chorus, but the natural world and what we have done to it is definitely a focus of Rook.” The album paints a dystopian portrait that interweaves lushly orchestrated ballads with feedback-drenched rockers. Its cover features a human silhouette standing on a rocky outcropping—arms outstretched, covered with birds.