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The Bowerbirds, hatched from a love of nature

By Steven Horowitz

The Bowerbirds’ Phil Moore grew up in Grinnell and attended the University of Iowa as a biology major. He lives in North Carolina now, but believes his love of nature stems from his roots in the Hawkeye state.

“Iowa is a beautiful place,” he says over the telephone from his apartment. “Growing up in a small town like Grinnell gave me the best of both worlds. I had the woods, but because of the school, we had all sorts of music coming through town. I remember shows by Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo when I was a teen that just blew me away.”

Moore played in the band Speed as Soft as a UI undergraduate, and he remembers gigs at onetime venues including Gabe’s Oasis, Gunnerz and the Green Room. More recently, The Bowerbirds played The Mill as part of the Mission Creek Festival. The Bowerbirds return to The Mill for a show on Monday, Jan. 18 (an earlier show was cancelled due to car problems.) Tickets for the 9 p.m. show are $8 and available in advance online.

“We’ll play lots of tunes from our newest record, Upper Air, and plenty of stuff from our first disc, Hymns for a Dark Horse,” Moore says. “I haven’t written anything new, and we rarely do covers.”

Describing the sound of The Bowerbirds is difficult. “I won’t even try,” Moore chuckles over the phone. “I’m afraid if I give up all my influences, they will all come after me and demand their songs back.”

The band is a threesome consisting of Moore on vocals and guitar, his wife Beth Tacular on bass, accordion and vocals, and currently Dan “Yan” Westerlund on drums. Moore says the trio will probably be joined by a friend on mandolin during the Iowa City show.

Critics have compared The Bowerbirds to the freak folk stylings of Devendra Banhart and the primitive acoustics of Bon Iver, but there is something more pastoral and atmospheric to the band’s sound. The Bowerbirds’ songs don’t contain verses and choruses as much as vocal sounds and the sounds of words in sort of dreamy repetitions that ebb and flow.

One can hear Moore’s obsessions with the natural resonances of the gurgles and inflections in the music. Moore and Tacular recently spent two and a half years living in an Airstream trailer in the woods without indoor plumbing or electricity.

“We recently moved to the city because we seemed to be touring so much and needed a place to do our business,” Moore says. “Besides, the heat has been nice during the latest cold spell. We are building a house in the woods and plan to live there in the future.”

Bowerbirds in Iowa are more commonly known as catbirds, a fairly common and plain looking creature with no distinctive traits. “That’s not what we named them after,” Moore explains. “True bowerbirds are from Australia. They may be drab in appearance, but they create these awesome nests made out of material like insect skeletons and rose petals.

“The nests are more decorative than functional,” Moore continues. “They are built by males to attract a mate.” He does not comment about the similarities to his own life.

After graduation from the University of Iowa, Moore got a job in South Carolina as a bird tracker. He lived with his then-girlfriend Beth in a small place. “We were immersed in nature. That’s where things really started happening for me.” Indeed.