These 'birds are taking flight

N.C. band leaves the nest for chance to tour

Bowerbirds - Phil Moore, Beth Tacular, and Mark Paulson - play a sold-out show on July 26 at the Museum of Fine Arts. (Derek L. Anderson)

"I have this sense that I have to write about something important, rather than love song No. 5,000," says Phil Moore, the singer and songwriter for the folk trio Bowerbirds. He's calling from North Carolina, with fellow Bowerbirds member Beth Tacular sitting within spitting distance of the phone in the house the couple is building together.

Bowerbirds - which include Mark Paulson, Moore's childhood friend from Iowa - are leaving their nest this summer with the rerelease of their debut album, "Hymns for a Dark Horse" on the nascent indie label Dead Oceans. They're on a tour that will take them across Europe and the United States, including a sold-out show opening for Bon Iver at the Museum of Fine Arts tomorrow night. (The bands head to Cape Cod on Sunday for a show at the Cape Cinema in Dennis; tickets are $15 at ticketleap.com.)

For Moore and Tacular, the band is another creative project they've pursued together, like house-building or a Web design company: "We kind of started doing everything together, and were figuring out ways to free ourselves from our normal daily life," Moore says.

The songs on "Horse," a wild celebration of the natural world, emerged from a bird-watching job.

"Beth and I were living in South Carolina, and I took a job watching birds for the summer, in this funny little place called Pet Village, a hunting village. It's now some sort of a nature conservatory," Moore says. "I started writing songs that were more simple [than Ticonderoga, Moore's other band] and more about melodies and singing. They were just for myself."

As Moore worked on the new songs, Tacular received an accordion for Christmas and learned it "in a month or two, kind of a ridiculously short time," leading to the couple's collaboration, eventually rounding out the music with Paulson on violin.

"Horse" is an impressive debut, and the combination of Moore's reedy voice, Tacular's high notes providing sweet counterpoint, and Paulson's warm voice creates some heavenly harmonies that are strong on record and chill-inducing live. Moore is mad for music, inspired by "older, '70s music," and is now listening to the likes of Graham Nash and Steve Reich. Hearing Dolly Parton can help him finish a song.

"We were at a bar one night, and someone put [Parton's] 'Jolene' on the stereo," he says. "It hit me perfectly and I immediately stole certain parts of the song to finish what I was working on. It's just like any other art: It takes."

On "Horse," the simple music is carefully arranged. A song like "Dark Horse" has an undulating, dynamic rhythm from the guitar and bass drum, and there's enough space to pay attention to the lyrics about preparing for winter. "My Oldest Memory" is written in the voice of an old man who "gives thanks/for being 100 and still feeling amazed." And that wisdom is typical, whether Moore is observing the tragedy of a blind horse running to his death or the tenderness of a celebration with old friends.

"I don't really feel like a writer writer in my life," says Moore. "I primarily always thought of myself as a songwriter. Words never have to stand on their own. I read a lot of poetry and nonfiction when I write songs."

Moore takes inspiration from poets like Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Gary Snyder, and nonfiction works by authors such as Derrick Jensen. These poets and writers are unified in their simple voices and mutual love of nature, qualities Moore shares in his songwriting. He expresses love for the natural world in a remarkably genuine voice that's never preachy.

When "Horse" was originally released last year, it got glowing reviews from the press, but also from a fellow singer-songwriter who knows a thing or two about quietly unsettling music: John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats. In a May 2007 post on his blog, he enthused, "Only once every 10 years or so does one hear a new band this good, this bursting with ideas, this audibly in love with music." He had the band open for him on his fall tour last year.

Through an e-mail, Darnielle sums up the band's appeal and how its music manages to get at some profound human truths.

"The point of comparison I think is with Thoreau. They have that level of really deep engagement with the world as a physical place, as a space that we inhabit," he says. "I think the Bowerbirds believe in the awesome power of the world itself, right? In a Walt Whitman sort of sense, maybe. Their songs sound like they are in love with the dirt and the grass and the trees, not infatuated but deeply physically passionately in love."

Of course, you can see the irony already. The more successful Bowerbirds become, the more these would-be trancendentalists are away from their shiny nest in this case, their new home. While touring is an opportunity for more travel, along with worry about gas prices and wasting gas, Moore ends up missing his house, his patch of land.

"Right now, the blackberries are coming up, and we want to can the blackberries," he says, then pauses. "When we started writing the songs, our goal was to move out into the country, to simplify our lives. And then we became this touring band."