Red Hunter thinks he's pretty good at the music business, which is why he's doing it all wrong.

"Pop culture has always been with us, in one form or another," says Grammy-winning musical comedian "Weird Al" Yankovic, "and it always has its ridiculous elements. Especially in the music world."

Excepting a brief hiatus at the tail end of the 1960s, recording artists The Contours have been performing and touring every year since 1960. It's just that, as original group member Sylvester Potts says, "People just didn't hear of us.

"But we was workin'," he continues. "Playing, goin' overseas, you know. We kept doing that 'til Dirty Dancing came out. And that shot us back out there." And how.

There is nobody like Andrew Bird in the world, a songwriter and a performer who makes his whistling, his glockenspiel, and his violin at home with guitars, drums, and vocals in detailed, pitch-perfect pop songs that never seem precious or forced, as eccentric as they are.

But when you're as idiosyncratic as Bird is, that means there aren't many people whose vision matches your own. That was one reason that the gestation of The Mysterious Production of Eggs - Bird's breakthrough from 2005 - took so long, with so many false starts.