Not A Robot, But A Ghost

"Not a Robot But a Ghost" has a typically ambiguous lyric from Andrew Bird, who sings about cracking the codes that end the war. What's it all about? He told Drowned In Sound: "I wrote these lyrics and wrestled with over a hundred tracks we painted on then peeled away with a heat gun. You could read this as a protest song, a break up song or some vague geopolitical quagmire instantly resolved by a brilliant algorithm."

Bird wrote this song with Martin Dosh, a musician who records simply as Dosh. The song first appeared as an instrumental called "First Impossible" on Dosh's 2008 album Wolves And Wishes. Bird added lyrics, renamed it "Not a Robot But a Ghost" (the title doesn't appear in the lyric), and included it on his fifth album, Noble Beast, in 2009. It was the last song he wrote for the album.