Justin Bailey
A few months ago, I found myself in Monterey, California, escaping the Minnesota cold for a few days and visiting a friend I met in college. One night, we decided to make the drive up to Santa Cruz to check out a show at a concert venue he had been telling me about for a few years.
The performer that night, Watsky, was someone I was pretty familiar with. When I was in high school, Watsky stopped at a small college in my hometown in Wisconsin on a spoken-word tour he was doing. He has since gone on to do much bigger things in the world of music and is quite a long way from that mostly-empty theater in Janesville, but I had yet to make it out to one of his concerts, so I was excited.
Lucky for us, we arrived at The Catalyst just as the opening act, Feed The Biirds, was taking the stage. Since neither of us did any research before the show, we assumed they were a local act warming up the crowd for the touring acts.
Immediately, we were both absolutely blown away by the powerful voice of Camila Recchio. Her ability to command the stage, combined with the ridiculous sound coming from her mouth, left me speechless for most of the performance.
Her partner, Kush Mody, was equally talented, picking up and playing a different instrument for pretty much every song they performed. One thing that also struck me about Kush was his undeniable positivity. Multiple times during the performance he would address the crowd, having them repeat positive affirmations and messages, before moving onto the next song.
Come to find out, Feed The Biirds was not some random duo pulled off the streets of Santa Cruz, but were actually both members of Watsky’s touring band; Camila handling back-up vocals and Kush lending his multi-instrumentalist abilities.
Like a lot of legendary groups in the music industry, Feed The Biirds was a product of “what would happen if we tried this?” coming to life. Camila & Kush told the crowd in Santa Cruz a story about showing Watsky their music for the first time while on a plane. His reaction was “How about you open up my tour for me?”
I spent the entire drive back to my friend’s house finding and following them on every social media platform I could, and saved their music on Spotify so I could listen to it on the flight back to Minnesota.
Fast-forward to February 17th, and Watsky was going to be bringing his ‘Complaint’ tour here to Minnesota, and although many Twin Cities hip-hop fans may have been more excited to hear that Grieves was along for the ride, the only name I was looking at on that poster was Feed The Biirds.
Kicking the night off promptly at 6:30 PM, Feed The Biirds picked up right where they left off in California. Once again, I was totally stunned by the pureness of Camila’s voice, and Kush’s mastery behind whatever instrument he happened to be playing during each song.
While their musical catalog is still a bit small (that’ll happen when you go from inception to back-to-back national tours in a matter of months), the music they do have is really something special. Within a few moments of their entrance, they already had the entire crowd throwing their hands back and forth, and were clearing making tons of new fans with every passing minute.
The positive affirmations and messages of positivity were also front-and-center for this show, too. You can tell how important sharing this music with the world is to them, and how much they want to use their platform to inflict positive change within the world.
Everything I thought about them when I had the pleasure of seeing their performance in Santa Cruz was completely validated on Sunday night at First Avenue. These two are the real deal. Feed the Biirds is a name that you need to be aware of, you’ll be seeing a lot of it in the future.
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