Rodrigo Amarante And His Great Musical Tantrum

Rodrigo Amarante is full of bird facts.

When we meet him at his home, sitting out on his wooden deck that overlooks northeast LA, his doors and windows are all open, sunshine cascading through them. Amarante sits cross-legged underneath a patio umbrella that he's fashioned wheels on so that it can move easily with the sun. Despite making shade, he wears round, turtle-shell sunglasses as he fiddles with a bottle-top, pondering what inspired the genesis of his second solo album.

"On the foreground, you see the bird feeder and the bird bath," he says, pointing, "which are major elements here of my environment."

Amarante has lived in LA for 13 years, and this house for nine of them. The property is teeming with birds: fantail pigeons — "which is a giant dove, really," he says, "beautiful, iridescent" — finches, mourning doves, woodpeckers, Bushtits, scrub jays.

There's a scrub jay that visits him every morning. Over time, Amarante learned that it enjoys peanuts with their shells on; now, he feeds it out of the palm of his hand. "One