Crane Like The Bird is music written and produced by multi-instrumentalist Kyle Crane featuring an impressive array of artists. The effect is a mingling of narrators and interpreters, but the album, steeped in autobiography, is akin to gazing out different windows of the same childhood house. As much as the phrase “Crane like the bird” is a folksy means of introduction, it’s also a nod to Crane’s pilot father. Irrepressibly handsome in a buzzcut and baseball tee on the back of the vinyl, Jeff Crane was a Coast Guard lieutenant out of Humboldt Bay, California; his helicopter went down in a 1997 search-and-rescue mission, leaving the family shattered. (The synth-laced “Mendocino,” sung by a breathy Luke Steele, paints the same scene in words as the record’s cover photograph: the family perched on a jagged cliff, marking the first anniversary with a rose tossed into the sea.) 
 Crane's lyrics get straight to the crux of it. “The things that I fell most deeply about were the time leading up to my dad’s death and then the trickle-down effect on my family,” Crane says of the homed-in focus on the record. The album—about love and loss and memory, but also ski lifts and Nintendo—makes clear that romance songs don’t have a monopoly on the universal human experience. 
 Crane is touring drummer for Rufus Wainwright , Neko Case , M. Ward , Rhye , and Daniel Lanois . He has recorded with Bill Frisell , Kurt Vile , Kurt Rosenwinkel and Brad Mehldau .