A Talking Head of His Time

If rock has a Renaissance man, it is David Byrne. An übergeek
with a visionary streak, Byrne has spread his creative tentacles in
numerous directions and disciplines, as both artist and mogul (with the
rewardingly unpredictable Luaka Bop records, which helped to raise the
profiles of Shuggie Otis and Os Mutantes, while also curating excellent
comps of Brazilian, African, and Cuban music).

Besides fronting one of the greatest rock bands ever, Talking Heads
(their first four albums are classics), Byrne has led a sporadically
brilliant solo career. He’s composed music for choreographer Twyla
Tharp (The Catherine Wheel), theater director Robert Wilson
(The Forest), the movie Young Adam (Lead Us Not into
Temptation). He’s directed and starred in the film True
Stories; designed the set and choreographed movements for one of
the greatest concert flicks of all time, Stop Making Sense; and
conceived a sound-art installation called Playing the Building in a 99-year-old Manhattan ferry terminal. Nine bike racks around New
York City bear his design aesthetic. Byrne has even appeared as himself
in a Simpsons episode. There’s more, and it gets odder.

In fact, a book could be written about Byrne’s enduring contribution
to modern culture (at least two already have been). But let’s focus
instead on the New York singer-
songwriter-guitarist’s
collaborations with Brian Eno, another unconventional icon whose own
brand of genius has accentuated Byrne’s idiosyncratic impulses. Their
fruitful teamwork fuels Byrne’s upcoming tour, “Songs of David Byrne
and Brian Eno.”

Following Eno’s contributions to “I Zimbra” on 1979’s Fear of
Music (which he produced) and 1980’s Afro-rock magnum opus
Remain in Light (which he produced and to which he lent backing
vocals and instrumentation), Eno and Byrne joined forces on 1981’s
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. A landmark work of sampledelia,
it influenced the hiphop group Public Enemy’s producers the Bomb Squad,
among many others. Using voices plucked from the airwaves and vinyl as
conveyors of messages and emotions as well as simply more layers of
texture in their compositions, Byrne and Eno created both a new strain
of dance music—call it “funk concrète”—and a
chilling hybrid of ethnic music and ambient. Side two of the original
LP, especially, hinted at a foreboding, novel direction for the mostly
innocuous new-age genre.

Side one, by contrast, featured Byrne and Eno’s fascination with
rhythms usually associated with Africans and African-Americans. With
its impassioned sermonizing about God from a black New Orleans preacher
set to a swiftly percolating approximation of highlife, “Help Me
Somebody” was a striking example of recontextualization. “Regiment”
also provided friction with its spare, seductively funky bass and drums
sparking off the sacred melisma of Lebanese mountain singer Dunya Yusin
and Robert Fripp’s serpentine guitar ululations. “The Jezebel Spirit”
contained an exorcist in devil-extracting mode while mutant Afro disco
bustled in the foreground. “America Is Waiting” built unbearable
tension with its skewed funk beats and white-radio-talk-show chatterer
spluttering about the exasperating state of things.

The difference between Bush of Ghosts and 2008’s
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is stark. The latter
is a more traditional, structured collection of songs that will not
inspire any future Bomb Squads. In broad terms, Everything That
Happens is an Anglo-American pop album while Bush of Ghosts is a global experimental work. Anyone expecting the 1981 collab’s
innovations will be disappointed. Taken on its own terms as a mature
display of songcraft by two of rock’s craftiest songwriters, though,
Everything That Happens is solid middlebrow entertainment,
certainly more satisfying than most similar efforts from younger
artists in the field (Eno, 60, composed the music; Byrne, 56, wrote the
lyrics).

The aerial view of a suburban home on the Everything That
Happens cover telegraphs the disc’s domestic thrust. Byrne excels
at finding existential meanings in mundane circumstances. In “Home,” he
sings, “Home will infect whatever you do/We’re home—comes to life
from outta the blue… We’re home and the band keeps marchin’
on/Connecting to ev’ry living soul/Compassion for things I’ll never
know.”

With storehouses of great works behind them, Byrne and Eno have
earned the right to scale back on the barrier-busting grind. It would
be unreasonable to demand that they deliver the lofty creative edginess
they achieved during their primes. Still, even if Everything That
Happens suffers from Byrne’s occasional lapses into sentimentality,
it does possess a few pieces that can rightfully enter the twosome’s
pantheon. “Strange Overtones” harks back to the casual, swaying funk of
Eno’s “No One Receiving,” but it features a more uplifting chorus, a
less morose aura, and a Robert Wyatt frame-drum solo. “One Fine Day” is
a stately ballad that echoes Eno’s faux-gospel paeans on Taking
Tiger Mountain (by Strategy). Album closer “The Lighthouse”
dreamily drifts toward the vanishing point, ambiguously floating
between resignation and hope.

In the liners, Byrne writes, “Where does the [disc’s] sanguine and
heartening tone come from, particularly in these troubled times? Some
of my lyrics and melodies were a response to what I sensed lay buried
in the music. My task was to bring forth into language what was
originally nonverbal.” Byrne made it happen, as usual.