The fourth season of Fargo — Noah Hawley’s excellent anthologized TV adaptation the Coen brothers’ excellent motion picture — premiered on FX this week. Further expanded the show’s extended universe, this season is set in Kansas City in 1950. When the trailer dropped, many of us were surprised to learn that Andrew Bird is in the cast alongside the likes of Chris Rock and Jason Schwartzman.

Bird is a talented NPR-friendly singer-songwriter, violinist, and handsome whistling bastard. He’s been a mainstay of the indie and chamber-pop spheres for a couple decades now. Just yesterday he announced a Christmas album on which he covers John Cale, John Prine, and the Handsome Family among others. But he’s never acted before, so his involvement in Fargo was somewhat of a shock.

Bird was even more stunned than the rest of us when Hawley offered him the role of funeral parlor owner Thurman Smutny. In a new interview with Billboard, he explains how it went down. As Bird tells it, he was playing a gig one night in Austin, where Hawley lives. After the show Hawley walked right up and offered him the role on the spot, without even an informal audition: “Just a quick meeting with him and I was like, ‘What makes you think I can do this?’ And he said, ‘You’re a dad right?'”

Bird says Hawley never seemed concerned about his lack of acting experience, but Bird himself was terrified when he showed up on set in his native Chicago. “The first thing he did was give me completely different dialogue, which was maybe by design in case I was too prepared,” Bird told Billboard. “I’ve never really understood acting. I’m a performer, but it’s a different thing to pretend to feel things that you don’t feel.” He says he’s gotten offers to do more acting, too. “I would definitely be interested in doing this again. Not just because I can’t tour right now, but that is one good reason. I find it really challenging and interesting work. I would be interesting to see what range I have beyond this character.”

Fargo airs Sundays at 9PM ET on FX.