Ding DONG: Red hot crooning ornithologist rock star

This category was MADE for men like Jonathan Meiburg, Austin Texas band Shearwater‘s front man. For those of you who don’t know, Shearwater produces big landscape driven folk music, akin to Arcade Fire’s lets-all-join-in with-triangles-and-tambourines sound. He’s the only man dubbed a “singer-songwriter-birder” by the New York Times. The only thing that could beat that in my books is if David Attenborough picked up the harmonica and played Beatles covers together with the inimitable and eery duets of Indonesian orangutans.

But what I’m writing to tell you is that just because I missed the band here in Vancouver, doesn’t mean you have to. Why? Because they’re playing for free tomorrow night in Battery Park in NYC. Let me repeat that. They. Are. Playing. For. Free. Tomorrow. In NYC. And it’s bound to be a kickass show. Don’t believe me? Well, believe the NYTimes review instead that raved about their Brooklyn show last year and was especially enamoured with their song White Waves “dedicated to the largest hammerhead shark that was ever caught with a rod and reel.”

Sure, naming your band after a bird (think: A Flock of Seagulls) does not a birder make. But Meiburg is the real mccoy. He spent 2001 in Tierra del Fuego studying the Striated Caracara (ding). And shared his experience with the audience of NPR in the same beautiful prose that peppers his songs (DONGGGggg).

Ear candy via iTunes: White Waves (about aforementioned tragic Hammerhead that was pregnant!)

And their latest album Palo Santo: Expanded Edition features the beautiful and catchy Red Sea, Black Sea.