Bird and the Bee take flight with music-first attitude

About the only subject that gets the members of the Bird and the Bee to talking is their agreement that, all told, they'd rather be doing something else. The duo -- singer Inara George and multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin -- are not particularly shy or diffident; they'd just prefer to be at work creating another song, rather than talking to journalists or having their picture taken. In fact, one of the songs on their self-titled debut album, "I Hate Camera," covers this very topic, detailing the everyday humiliations of a photo shoot; its bubbly chorus features George chirping, over and over, "Don't take my picture."

"The extra part of promotion can be fun, but there is a part of it that's a necessary evil, on occasion," says George. "Greg and I, we have more of a nerdy outlook. We like to be in the studio, and hang out, and wear sloppy clothes. The making of the music is actually the most joyful part of it."

Kurstin wholeheartedly agrees. "You grow up, and you're getting into music, and learning your instrument, and writing songs. You're really not thinking, 'I can't wait to get in front of the camera someday! I can't wait!' "

Luckily for studio rats Kurstin and George, their music-first, promotion-second attitude has paid off handsomely, with a critically acclaimed album chock-full of clever lyrics and bouncy melodies. "The Bird and the Bee" hides George's romantically bruised, biting lyrics under a fountain of melody purchased on the installment plan from Burt Bacharach and Brazilian Tropicalia. Like their pop-icon forebears, the Bird and the Bee place shimmering waves of sound front and center, but their frothy tunes often manage to hide nuggets of raw emotion. Their music offers a distilled essence of summer, but at the same time, "The Bird and the Bee" is, after repeated listens, the sound of a broken heart slowly, painfully healing. Fresh from a European tour, the Bird and the Bee play the Roxy with headliner Lily Allen tomorrow night.

George, daughter of Little Feat's Lowell George, had never been particularly attracted to music, despite her bloodline. "It was never something that I thought I would do, growing up," she says. Early stints with the bands Lode and Merrick eventually led to a solo career and the recording of her debut solo album, 2005's "All Rise." Kurstin was hired by the album's producer, Mike Andrews, to play piano and keyboards behind George. Having gotten his start with the genre-busting California group Geggy Tah, which recorded three albums on David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, Kurstin had also made a name for himself as a producer and session musician, touring with Beck and Gwen Stefani and working in the studio with Karen O, the Flaming Lips, and Allen (Kurstin produced three tracks on Allen's "Alright, Still").

During the lengthy recording process of "All Rise," Kurstin and George decided to experiment on their own, and the result was "Again & Again," which would eventually serve as the leadoff track of their album. Realizing that they shared an interest in golden-hued '60s pop, Kurstin and George camped out in the studio, taking their initial inspiration and spinning it out into a full record.

"We were sort of thinking that we were writing pop songs," George tentatively suggests. "It started out as a really fun experiment, and then we kept with the tone of that, and then it continued on into the full record." Kurstin sees the collision of light and dark as essential to the Bird and the Bee. "I like when lyrically something goes one way to maybe offset it musically. I don't know -- if something starts to get really happy, I instinctually want to hear something darker in there."

Many of the songs on the album (like "I'm a Broken Heart," "Again & Again," and "Because") appear to circle around the same dysfunctional relationship, but George denies direct autobiographical relevance to her lyrics. "It's not a specific relationship. That's the thing about the project is that it is kind of like creating a song and a character [to go] with the song. Everyone's been in the circumstance where they've wanted someone to be their boyfriend and it's never happened. . . . A universal thing, and then you flesh it out a little bit, and it becomes a story. I doubt that most songwriters are ever really clearly autobiographically direct, you know?"

Not much for autobiographical directness, whether in their lyrics or their interviews, the Bird and the Bee prefer to hole up in their favorite place -- the studio. Choosing to stick with the method that got them here, George and Kurstin have been grabbing spare moments during their current tour to record. "Like the first record, we would do a song at a time, and just take our time, and so that's what we're doing now," says Kurstin. "We're just writing a song here and there, just trying to ease into it. So when it gets to be that time, we'll have some songs ready to go, and we won't have to rush into it in two weeks or anything like that." Preferring to save their voices for the music, the Bird and the Bee continue to tweak their recipe of sweet and sour, soft and hard, looking for that perfect, eternal pop sound.