Andrew Bird may not consider himself to be a man out of time, but his renaissance talents and fascination with music from 19th and early 20th century suggest otherwise.

In our fickle pop-culture world, we don’t run into many virtuosos these days. If you’ve ever seen Bird perform or heard one of his patented, orchestral pop songs, you know you’re in the presence of a master musician—whether he’s playing guitar, violin, glockenspiel, or just whistling. His background includes classical training for violin and a music scholarship at Northwestern University, as well as a late-’90s stint playing with the retro-swing band, Squirrel Nut Zippers.

For the uninitiated, Bird’s unique sound emanates from a gypsy dervish of symphonic layers, baroque rhythms, and jazz/classical inflections that swirl into lush chamber-pop concoctions. If that’s not enough, his lyricism blends the touch of a poet with the empirical observations of a scientist. The right brain hotwires the left in Bird’s elaborate creations.

I spoke with Bird from his stop in Missouri, where he was decamped for a show on his year-long tour of Noble Beast, his sixth solo record. Though he often plays solo behind his pocket symphony and array of loop pedals, this time out he also featured Martin Dosh on percussion and Jeremy Ylvisaker on bass.

To reconcile his classical background with his pop ambitions, Bird explains, “When I was 24, I was on this more linear path. The music I was playing and writing was getting more complex, and I could just see that exhausting itself—there wasn’t a whole lot of depth to it. Then I realized that the hardest thing I could do was write something that’s simple and almost childlike. That’s infinitely challenging, mysterious, and elusive.”

Noble Beast maintains the excellence of 2007’s Armchair Apocrypha, and offers yet another collection of Bird’s sumptuous melodies and surreal wordplay. Thematically, it echoes his earlier records, but also focuses more on what it means to be a sentient human being surviving amidst the technological debris of the 21st century. New songs like “Masterswarm” and “Anoanimal” use the insect and animal kingdoms, respectively, as metaphors for our own internal struggles. With an electronic din that recalls some of Radiohead’s murkier samples, “Not a Robot but a Ghost” traces love’s disintegration through the guise of a hacker trying to “crack the code” of his lover’s absence.

Bird says, “I didn’t start with a concept on the new record. But I think I was moving on a little more from being interested in molecular science and obscure history to more natural history. I just like the idea of that time when species were still being named, a botanist naming some obscure fern, and the energy that exists right before something is given a name. And then the names themselves give me inspiration.”

Science and its specialized vocabulary embody such a preoccupation for Bird that I can’t help but ask if he’s a frustrated surgeon—after all, he’s got the magic hands and the needed precision. He laughs, “I don’t engage in science like a scientist with an empirical, mathematical approach to things. I try to set up science to fail, so at the end it’s something more mysterious than we all thought. The scientist in my songs is trying to quantify these things with his instruments and eventually throws his hands up in frustration. I guess it is a frustrated scientist—because I am setting him up to fail.”

Language has always been one of Bird’s fascinations. Often, his lyrics read like the shorthand notes of a doctoral student in linguistics—but they rhyme. Try singing along with “Proto-Sanskrit Minoans to porto-centric Lisboans / Greek Cypriots and Hobis-hots / Who hang around the ports a lot,” from “Tenuousness”, and then reel off a 12-bar whistle solo for an exclamation point. He sings mid-song, “Here’s where things start getting weird.” Indeed.

Bird has actually been criticized for choosing words for their sounds rather than their meaning, but as he explains, “I could go through every song and tell you exactly where the lines came from, and what they mean. But that’s not so much my intention, to lay out all my feelings and thoughts, and certainly not in a matter-of-fact way. ‘Cause I never really cared about the story in a particular song, I always focus on one or a couple words that were so pleasing—they could be in Portuguese, I don’t really care.”

With his inventive use of syntax, Bird uncovers and satirizes the ways language evolves and devolves through misuse. He says, “That’s kind of a recurring theme in a couple records—the cheapening of sentiment in language, the overuse and buying and selling of emotion in our culture—these intangible things that we do our best to co-opt. I think that’s why I search for other words, and sometimes even invent new words and imbue them with meaning again.”

He alludes to this in “Fitz and the Dizzyspells”, a punster standout on the new record: “Has a name but the name goes unspoken / It’s in vain ‘cause the language is broken.” With so many of our cultural gatekeepers, from politicians to TV’s talking heads, manipulating language for profit and propaganda’s sake, truth has become that rare commodity. Bird surprises us by stripping words of their standard context, and juxtaposing them in new combinations—he’s a bit of a pop deconstructionist, if you will. Besides Bob Dylan, he’s one of the few select songwriters who might have the chutzpah needed to try to rhyme Jacque Derrida’s name with barracuda. (I’m still waiting for that one.)