Simone Endress ‘24

Avery working on his block print of a dove/pigeon.

Avery Milner— a.k.a Whirlybird— has been writing songs since before he could play them. Their musical career started around the age of 7, when their parents enrolled them in guitar lessons. “I got kicked out,” they recount, laughing. “I kept coming into our lessons with like a post-it note with lyrics that I had written and I would sing a melody and be like: ‘Okay, can you show me how to play this on the guitar?’... He told my parents that I just wasn't ready.” Fifteen years later, Avery has taught himself how to play guitar and found his groove in the musical scenes of Sarah Lawrence and Brooklyn. They recently released their first record “Dove is a Pigeon'' with eight original songs. I spoke to Avery about the album and his musical journey on an afternoon in Heimbold Visual Arts Center, while the artist carved a print of their dove/pigeon symbol into a block for printmaking.

Avery describes the new album as “a labor of love” that sticks out in his mind because of the arduous process of creating it. The songs were written in the span of about a year, but the recording process proved to be challenging. “I had a lot of bad housing things that happened to me in May 2021. A lot of that is in the album…I didn’t have a lot of stability so plans continued to fall through.” Things finally began to come together when Avery left school briefly in fall 2021, and he was able to get together with his music partner Matt and record. Mixing and mastering also took some time, but “finally over winter break [of 2022] we had a long wrestle with it” and the record came together. Out of that process came an eclectic mix of twangy folk, mellow bass, and energetic guitar picking all accompanied by folksy vocals that vary in intensity throughout the tracks. It’s truly interdisciplinary, and always smooth in transition from one sound to another.

Because of the drawn-out process, shows have felt strange for Avery, who sometimes feels a disconnect from the songs they wrote in 2021. “My friend told me at my release show, because I was so nervous… ‘You just have to honor the songs, and honor yourself when you wrote those songs.’ So now I just see it as a published chapter in my life, which is like a really nice way to think about it.”

Avery also notes that he’s trying to avoid the online aspect of the music scene. “I just don’t have the wherewithal to market myself almost. I like the human component...I think people find a sort of genuineness in my music and when I perform it live…If I can hold onto that, that’s a special way of sharing music with people.”

The music is deeply authentic and displays a complex relationship between self and place. “[The album is] about city and industry and smog and that either overtaking nature or the opposite…Also like that whole year of writing, it was me realizing that I was trans. And so like grappling with my physical body that I wasn't comfortable in, in a physical space that I wasn't comfortable in.”

It’s a coming of age story which Avery recommends listening to sequentially on the Metro North to Grand Central. The record follows a trajectory of someone struggling with young adulthood at Sarah Lawrence and in New York City.

Avery showing off his dove/pigeon tattoo.

Avery smiles and looks away from his carving as he shares his thoughts on the Sarah Lawrence Community. “I think it's so clear that there's so much talent here and so much drive to like, be involved and it really is exciting and it does make me a little sad, though, that I can't continue. I love to see people just posted up in the Blue Room, having a show on a weeknight…it's really nice to see people who've been told that they can't use spaces, realize that no, there's really no one enforcing that. And we are able to contribute to campus culture and just make it happen.”

Avery will be graduating this December and hopes to pursue a career in documentary podcasting or film production, while continuing to write and play music.

Whirlybird’s “Dove is a Pigeon”