Talking Heads & David Byrne

Coming into the spotlight in the years of the New Wave, the Talking Heads were one of the most bands renovating rock music during the rock scene at the end of the 1970s. First of all, they marked a return to the ideal of the intellectual in rock music that had first emerged with the folksingers of the Greenwich Movement and that had disappeared with progressive-rock. Secondly, they introduced revolutionary innovations into the element of rhythm. Rock music had always been “driving,” with its pillars being drums and bass, but with the Talking Heads that concept was refounded ex novo.

The Talking Heads were formed by three students at the Rhode Island School of Design. Unlike their counterparts in the New Wave, they were well-behaved students, not punks, who since 1974 had been performing in the coffeehouses around their university. Theirs was a kind of party music that borrowed from the repertoire of rhythm and blues. In 1975, David Byrne (vocals and guitar, born in Scotland in 1952), Chris Frantz (drums), and Tina Weymouth, (bass) moved to New York, where they met the artists and writers of the Greenwich Village. In June of that year they first appeared at CBGB’s, and in December of 1976 they recorded their first single, which contains Love Goes to Building on Fire and the first version of New Feeling. Building on Fire already packed the essence of their art: almost atonal strumming, stately singing but with little emotion, a rhythm and blues horn section, a martial step that was almost ska, and demented vocal effects. They soon recruited a keyboardist, Jerry Harrison (a veteran who had been around since 1967, who in 1972 had played in the legendary sessions of the Modern Lovers).

The album 77 (Sire, 1977) was one of the milestones of the New Wave. On it, Byrne sang bizarre stories drawn from the subculture of the teenagers, while the musicians accompanied him with danceable cerebral music whose oblique rhythm was a neurotic hybrid of funk and rock'n'roll. As it was often the case in the music of the New Wave generation, the songs of the Talking Heads were only superficially related to the music of the parties and of the dance clubs, and in reality and under the surface served to unmask the anxieties and frustrations that were hidden behind the those parties and those dance clubs.

The band’s sound was apparently cold and tidy, sometimes rigidly hierarchical (on top is the instrument leading the riff, others follow behind to embellish and arrange, and at the bottom is the rhythm section), and sometimes absolutely flat (the notes seemingly glued to each other, one after another, with all of the instruments operating at the same level). In this manner, the group, along with the catchy singing, ended up causing an effect of obsessive estrangement. It was apparently inorganic music, but in reality plastic and elastic. Far from being naive, their style, in fact, constituted a study on post-modern communication and perception, always against a background of urban alienation.

In fact, the band overturned many of the conventions of rock music. Every song created intellectual tension instead of the traditional emotional outburst. Instead of the scruffy vehemence of punk rock and of the complex scores of other intellectuals, the Talking Heads were proposing the simplicity, professionalism and composure.

Far away from the sub-proletarian milieu that had produced so much of rock music up to that point, the Talking heads played tight and prudish songs that had little or nothing to do with sex, alcohol, drugs, and violence (the classic themes of rock music).

The goal of the Talking Heads was to recover the jovial simplicity of the 1960s, and they achieved that, however distorted the result was by the introverted Byrne. His voice was a breaking point for the entire tradition of rock singing. It sounded as if it came straight from the office of a Manhattan skyscraper, at the same time cool, elegant, and claustrophobic. His desperate lyrics explored teenage culture “from within,” while repudiating the perverse fantasies and the wishful thinking which were in vogue at the time, to instead investigate the first naive awareness of the adolescence age.

At the same time, the rhythm section grafted ethnic cues (reggae, pow wow, steel band) onto a funky base. All of the instruments contributed to the rhythmic structure.

The emphatic anthem Tentative Decisions is propelled by a drum roll, and the light-hearted vaudeville of Don’t Worry about the Government is accompanied by a Mediterranean mandolin and a jazzy vibraphone. The operatic, jazz-rap crooning of Book I Read alternates with minimalist repetition of the keyboards, the funky soul of Uh Oh Love Comes to Town is "estranged" by a Caribbean metallophone, the minimalist reggae of New Feeling drowns in a tribal beat, and the South American fanfare of First Week Last Week crosses Mexican laments with a duet of marimba and saxophone. The psychotic nursery rhyme Psycho Killer, with a French chorus (“Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?”) and a homicidal bass pulse, marks the formal pinnacle of this painstaking art of interlocking elements.

Byrne is a modern chansonnier who juggles with class a jungle of various styles, from Merseybeat to soul, from rockabilly to psychedelia, and is able to compress all of these styles into an easy listening structure and over a relatively weak scaffolding.

When the progressive rock theorist Brian Eno, a careful student of the new fauna of New York, befriended the New Wave theorist David Byrne, the underlying theme of the music of Talking Heads came forcefully to the surface: the fusion of ethnic rhythms and modern technology. On More Songs about Buildings and Food (Sire, 1978), the band permanently banned solos and permanently enshrined the primacy of the rhythm. The production is all the more meticulous and the “touch” of Eno translates into a more aggressive attitude.

The production utilizes devious arrangements which shift the harmonic center of gravity, leaving the impression that the songs oscillate back and forth between two (or more) different styles: for example, the martial dance of war of Found a Job, which starts out as a twisted funky number and morphs into thundering disco music, or the chameleo-like funk music of With Our Love, another "Indian" wardance that turns into a sobbing Doors-ian threnody. The vocal style (emphatic, Brechtian, and farcical), the guitar style (crystalline and yet atonal), and the rhythmic style (frantic but measured) of the band are sublimated in the false country ballad Big Country.

Eno’s presence in the control room is particularly pronounced in the songs in which the 1960s party atmosphere is disrupted by sound effects, such as Artists Only, a psychotically paced dance with psychedelic overtones, the crescendo of the insane and orgiastic Stay Hungry, and in the various primal nursey rhymes, like the rock and roll charge of Thank You for Sending Me an Angel, and the catchy refrain of The Girls Want to be with the Girls, which is alternatively lysergic and dreamy.

The perverted ballad a` la Psycho Killer is reprised in the dissonant guitar and the distorted singing of Warning Sign.

The whole album flows in a climate of subterranean tension. Neurosis vibrates inside the notes of Byrne's apparently carefree refrains like a fourth instrument.

This album closes the first phase of the Talking Heads' career, the “adolescent” phase, the phase of heavy funk applied to teenage life.

Fear of Music (Sire, 1979) shifted the band’s center of gravity sharply towards the danceable end of the spectrum, and, in practice, pushes their spartan funk music to the threshold of the most orgiastic disco music. At the same time, with this album Byrne abandons teenage effervescence to adopt a more dramatic and austere tone, more the role of an apocalyptic messiah than the censor of youth's morals. The manifesto of the new style is I Zimbra, an orgy of feverish percussion and hiccupping choirs (perhaps stealing some ideas from Fleetwood Mac's Tusk), with funky guitar phrases and minimalist repetition. The sterilized world music of this song would eventually become a research topic for the band in the following years.

The painstaking emotional progressions of the first albums recur in the martial chant of Paper and in the funk-soul of Mind, with plenty of clapping, of obsessively minimalist guitar patterns, and ecstatic chanting inspired by Indian singing.

The new solutions enter the gloomiest paranoia, with a hypnotic and stunning sound culminating in the delirium of Memories Can Wait (crawling bass riff, voodoo-esque beat, Byrne's recitation lyrics refracted like in a psychoanalytic nightmare, and horror-movie-esque keyboards), in the threnody of Life During Wartime (driving robotic pace, vibrant and almost desperate singing that collapses in the motto “this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco” screamed hysterically by the choir in the manner of a group of madmen), and in the nightmarish fresco of the hyper-kinetic Suicide-esque Cities, an almost funky version of the expressionist cabaret of the 1920s, of Brecht's alienated and didactic theater, or a pagan neo-tribalism, heretical and blasphemous, that turns alienation into ritual. In the mental breakdown of Heaven and in the lysergic and ambient syncopes of Drugs, one instead discovers a more subtle and disturbing form of anxiety at the edge of absurdist theater.

Remain In Light (Sire, 1980) marked the baroque peak of Eno-Byrne's densely-layered angst-tinged productions. This album further explores the “disco” cues of the previous one and effectively reinvents the sound of the band. The metamorphosis involves the entire structure, which contrasts the primitive simplicity of the beginnings with a more complex strategy of sound overlays. But the disturbing psychiatric dimension of songs like Memories Can Wait is downplayed here to focus on the consumer aspect. To paraphrase the old motto, “this is a party, this is a record.” The turnaround is devious, but total.

Eno is now for all intents and purposes the fifth member of the Talking Heads, but although he co-wrote all the songs, his personality remains in the background compared to Byrne's. Eno's presence is nevertheless crucial in defining the new style, which is in fact a cross between Byrne's pan-ethnic genius and Eno's electronic manipulations. Thus, on the one hand there is a great deployment of percussion and the recovery of tribal-style vocalism; on the other, everything is subjected to a process of electronic revision, dishing out echoes and reverberations, up to the nightmarish frequencies of Overload, timeless lysergic darkness, veering into full electronic avantgarde.

Once in a Lifetime is a field of fibrillating electronic, African percussions, jagged funk bass lines and (at the end) Velvet Underground-ian distorted drones that is roamed and scavenged by choral folk-like chanting. Houses in Motion juxtaposes a boiling polyrhythmic reggae dance with a triple call-and-response schema between a calm reciting voice, a high-pitched emphatic chanting voice and a bass choir, and then adds touches of elephant-sounding Jon Hassell-ian trumpet and petulant guitar. The hypnotic jungle sound of Born Under Punches spins around another deluxe mixture of recitation and chanting (ending in a polyphonic confusion of voices) at a faster, almost frantic, intricate rhythm, with guitars gymnastics that borders on dissonance. A thick African groove and African choral chanting propel Great Curve, framed by ringing guitar patterns, and ripped apart by a loud distorted guitar solo before opening up in a joyful fanfare.
On the other hand, the mood established by the dreamy reverbs and bubbling noises of the funereal litany Listening Wind culminates with Overload, a slow-motion electronic black-hole of lysergic trance.

The album undoubtedly constitutes an in-depth study of the modern danceable, its debts to the archaic danceable, and its relations to urban alienation, but it sacrifices the jovial spontaneity of the beginnings for a totally artificial sound. Not surprisingly, despite the waste of “exotic” quotations, in the end the music sounds more “white” and “European” than ever. There is now a gulf between the mathematical theorem demonstrated by the Talking Heads and the wild practice of the Pop Group, who were performing the same operation of fusion (rock and roll, funk, world-music). The main merit of the album is to popularize to the general public a new form of rock song, somewhat as Blondie and the Cars were doing on neighboring fronts. Unfortunately, Byrne will spend much of his career rewriting Once In A Lifetime.

That album marked the peak of the band's cohesion as it started disintegrating under the weight of those complex ideas. Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz launched a project of lightweight funk entertainment, the Tom Tom Club, that released Tom Tom Club (Sire, 1981), boasting Genius Of Love and Wordy Rappinghood. However, Close To The Bone (Sire, 1983), containing Pleasures Of Love, would disappoint.

Harrison recorded The Red And the Black (Sire, 1981), an inferior clone of Remain In Light.

Byrne's next move was a collaboration with Brian Eno, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (Sire, 1981). The album celebrated an artistic marriage of primary importance.
The duo that invented techno-ethno-funk (funk with ethnic overtones and electronic arrangements) orchestrates the album for the two fundamental elements of that genre: ethnic percussion and electronic instruments. While the former are busy and in the foreground, the latter are left to drift in the background, no more than a mystical blabbering during a wild cerimony. Byrne and Eno do more than just couple these elements in a psychological way: they also subtly employ avantgarde techniques to fuse them in structures that artfully blur geometry and chaos.
Eno's program of "westernizing" the music of the Third World through a calculated fusion of futurism and primitivism marries Byrne's intellectual funk. Their high-tech world-music is best exemplified by the muezzin chanting and raga guitar of Regiment (with one of his best solos), by the hallucinated voodoo dance of Very Very Hungry.
But there's more to it than a simple revision of Remain In Light. While Remain In Light was still entertainment, Bush Of Ghosts is philosphy. This is not an album of music, it is a university thesis on rhythm. The minimalistic crescendo of Jezebel Spirit straddles Terry Riley's In C and Steve Reich's Musaic For Mallet Instruments. By looping syncopated riffs and unleashing polirhythmic percussions in a thick mix of sonic events, America In Waiting deconstructs funk edonism. In Mea Culpa a rapid-fire mantra and a frenzy of African drums keep the guitar distant and unreal. Help Me Somebody layers a gospel sermon over tribal funk and jungle effects. The vocal sample is modulated and looped to bring out a musical quality from the emphatic delivery. At the same time, Eno's and Byrne's is a music of displacement: ordinary sounds lose their meaning and need to find new roles.
Jon Hassell's "fourth-world music" creeps out from all these tracks but never more openly than in A Secret Life, his evocative dreamy trumpet replaced by sampled voice.
Byrne and Eno ventured even beyond their premises with Come With Us, an abstract pastiche of beats, distortions and reverbs, and with Mountain Of Needles, the funereal closing of the album.
The album was a product of Byrne's fascination with funk, and rhythm in general, and of the duo's skills in sound manipulation. While not always artistically successful (certainly too "spoken"), its instrumental scores will be highly influential.

In 1981, Byrne also distilled from his multifaceted work in videotape and performance the soundtrack for an experimental ballet by choreographer Twyla Tharp, The Catherine Wheel (Sire, 1981), 64 minutes of pulsating anxiety and alienated sighs, of which at least His Wife Refused and Big Business recall the atmospheres of Remain In Light while adding the experimentation of My Life. My Big Hands features a brilliant guitar solo.

In 1985, Byrne also premiered one of his theatrical pieces, The Tourist Way Of Knowledge, and composed the music for an epic work by Robert Wilson, Music For The Knee Plays, thirteen dreamlike tableaux performed by a brass ensemble echoing Slavic folklore, Kabuki theater, New Orleans marches, and the minimalism of Philip Glass.

The multiple centrifugal tendencies within Talking Heads (Byrne’s solo experiments and the Tom Tom Club) slowed the band’s discography, which essentially stagnated until 1983.

The new album, Speaking In Tongues (Sire, 1983), without Eno, while retaining the danceable energy in the inspired formalism of a disco-funky rhythm abstracted from its popular origins, marks a return to the minimal structuralism of Fear Of Music, facilitated by the rhythmic synthesis of Frantz and Weymouth, and accentuated by Byrne’s fractured guitar work. On one hand, the band preserves the torpid afro-billy of recent records, but on the other, it moves through introspective and neurotic chills, as in the early albums, rather than waves of overwhelming ecstasy. Byrne again declaims hoarsely over the insistent tribalism of Burning Down The House, disrupted by the usual offbeat guitar patterns and acerbic funky keyboard tones. The polyrhythmic fanfare of Pulling Up The Roots is contrasted by the semi-raga of Making Flippy-floppy and the gospel anthem of Slippery People. Percussive flourishes and bouncy keyboards are subdued in the “sweet” soul of This Must Be The Place. The album primarily marks a return to singing, which reigns supreme again, and to the everyday romanticism of the band’s early records.

Little Creatures (Sire, 1985) marked the commercial zenith of Talking Heads, a collection of upbeat melodies that tell tales of new wave fairies (And She Was, the most carefree chorus, and Lady Don't Mind). The neurotic, convulsive abstraction of their early work transforms here into a crystalline and innocent psychedelia, ethereal and smiling. The oppressive "Eno-style" disco formalism, with its paranoid polyrhythms, is reduced to a quasi-rhythmic folk. The country-and-western of Creatures Of Love, the rhythm-and-blues fanfare of Television Man, the eccentric boogie of Stay Up Late (the most ironic dance track of their career), and the martial gospel-Cajun of Road To Nowhere (the metaphysical apotheosis of Byrne’s poetics) mark the band’s joyful crisis of infantilism, a case of regression comparable to Jonathan Richman. Byrne’s vulnerability, which had been hidden for years behind Eno’s formal abstractions, finally has the courage to present itself publicly.

Byrne also wrote and directed the film True Stories (Sire, 1986), an opportunity for a soundtrack and a namesake Talking Heads album. The soundtrack is performed by a variable cast of collaborators and, for the first time in Byrne’s solo career, is structured as songs, several of which are instrumental and each of which expands the personality of one of the film’s characters. Apart from Cocktail Desperado, a dark and solemn Zevon-style ballad sung by Terry Allen, the tracks are minor fragments of synth-pop, Tex-Mex, country, and cocktail jazz. (He would do better in the ethnic suite composed for Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor”).

Byrne’s revisionism is also evident in the Talking Heads album. Since the film is set in a Texas town, the music draws on indigenous sounds: Cajun (the sinister Papa Legba), gospel (the frantic Puzzlin' Evidence), southern rock (the explosive Love For Sale), country (the anthem People Like Us, the ideological manifesto of the new phase), yodel (Wild Wild Life). Wild Wild Life, a small vocal masterpiece by Byrne, first features him as a hoarse shouter and then as a playful childlike madman, soaring into a thin Cars-style chorus. The concept (and the film) closes with the poetic epigraph of City Of Dreams, a transcendent hymn to the “American dream.”
These are affectionate vignettes of urban life, amusing portraits of eccentric characters trapped in the banality of the everyday. The sentimental plot of his tableau revalues America as the city of dreams, rejecting alienation and materialism. In the vein of Frank Capra’s optimism, far from Sam Shepard’s alienated frontier and close to tabloid clichés, Byrne prioritizes a sense of community over the infamous individualism of modern society. At most, he explores the schizoid subconscious of the urban consumer. Abandoning the dreamlike surrealism of Little Creatures, True Stories thus ends up defining Byrne’s revisionist ideology in more populist terms and in line with Mellencamp’s “blue-collar rock.”

Confirming the rapid and inexorable decline of the artist, the last Talking Heads album, Naked (Sire, 1988), is also the worst, so focused on the pursuit of ultimate sophistication that it flirts with the most saccharine world music (the Caribbean tribalism of Flowers, the uninhibited funky-soul of Blind, the feverish mambo of Mr Jones), ultimately confirming that his career had been on a downhill trajectory. It seems like a poor copy of Remain.

Jerry Harrison recorded another album, Casual Gods (Sire, 1987), this time assisted by prestigious names like Bernie Worrell, David van Tieghem, and Chris Spedding. A third solo album, Walk on Water (Sire, 1991), would be another opportunity to bring together important friends.

The Tom Tom Club returned with the ambitious, luxurious, and refined Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom (Fontana, 1988) and the catchy yet conventional Dark Sneak Love Action (Sire, 1992), featuring disco-friendly ballads like the title track and As The Disco Ball Turns.

Attributed to the Heads, No Talking Just Head (MCA, 1996) marks the official "reunion," although missing David Byrne; Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth recruited eleven singers, from Johnette Napolitano to Gordon Gano, from Debbie Harry to Michael Hutchence. The results are mediocre.

David Byrne is not aging well. The man who reinvented funk (and the rock star persona) like no one else now alternates between little operas too light to be taken seriously and theater soundtracks that are far too serious for his compositional talent. The occasional moments of genius, such as the salsa songs Dirty Old Town and Make Believe Mambo, or the solo in Lie to Me on Rei Momo (Luaka Bop, 1989)—the soundtrack to a documentary filmed in Brazil and a sort of introductory guide to South American music—the pop songs Monkey Man and Now I'm Your Mom, and the solo in A Million Miles Away on Uh Oh (Luaka Bop, 1992), are further hampered by the lyrics. It is no surprise, given the poor quality of his previous work in this area, that the soundtrack Forest (Luaka Bop, 1991), his first orchestral work (premiered in 1988), falls flat, as tedious as Music For The Knee Plays had been. After all, the last Talking Heads album, Naked (Sire, 1988), had also been the worst, so focused on the pursuit of ultimate sophistication that it brushed against the most saccharine world music, ultimately confirming that his career had been on a downward slope (and perhaps justifying suspicions that it was one of the greatest bluffs in rock history).

With the album David Byrne (Luaka Bop, 1994), the singer and guitarist returned to his roots, to the rock period of the early Talking Heads, at most complementing his band's work with sampling and arrangements as a savvy producer. Both domestic serenades like My Love Is You, written with the verbosity of a budding Shakespeare, lively little songs like Angels (which borrows the riff from the Talking Heads’ Once In A Lifetime), and calm lullabies like Buck Naked reveal a mature man grappling with his existential torments. As Angels says: "I'm just an advertisement for a version of myself."

A much more confused and unresolved figure today than yesterday, Byrne gives the impression of composing music without following any inspiration, simply applying elementary rules of quotation—whether quoting popular genres, avant-garde styles, or… himself.

Feelings (Luaka Bop/Warner, 1997) continues the same pan-stylistic and pan-ethnic project (Miss America), but stumbles even more into dispersion and confusion (even venturing into jungle on Fuzzy Freaky and The Gates Of Paradise).

Byrne rode the tiger of new wave with cold detachment, a movement with which he had little or nothing in common. A multifaceted genius of music, theater, and film, Byrne perfectly embodies the intellectual of 1980s multi-media New York. At the core of his lyrics are the French masters of alienation, Proust and Camus, further infused with a penchant for surreal fables reminiscent of Kafka—but it is not so much the message itself that matters as his estranging method of communicating it, hysterically jumping from “high” art to “low” art, giving an effect akin to a B-movie screened at La Scala.

In addition to inventing a new guitar technique (made entirely of minimalist plucks) and a singing style (made of “Brechtian” sobs), Byrne took Eno’s meta-linguistic techniques to their highest level of perfection and applied them to dance music from around the world.

The psychological complexes of his youth (personified in his singing style) gradually gave way to a rediscovery of international folklore, perhaps representing an attempt to escape the intellectual world in which he had been trapped.

The moniker Tom Tom Club was resurrected after an eight-year hiatus for the album The Good The Bad And The Funky (Rykodisc, 2000). The band's heavy grooves now add bits of ska and reggae to keep the party going (Time To Bounce, She's Dangerous). Distinguished guests from all over the world (a Jamaican toaster, an African kora player, Bernie Worrell) add a world-music flavor to the stew. Their colors magnify the pathos of the most lyrical songs: Wayfaring Stranger, Lesbians By The Lake and Holy Water. Nobody noticed, but this could be Tom Tom Club's best album ever.

Look Into The Eyeball (Virgin, 2001) shows that, like most of the intellectual/revolutionaries of the 1980s, in the new century David Byrne is turning towards Latin music (Moment Of Conception, Desconocido Soy, Smile), Afro-American rhythms, orchestral arrangements (The Accident) and soul balladry (Neighborhood, Walk On Water). Byrne's new dream is to cross-pollinate the Beach Boys and Tricky. The result is boring, uninspired, senile muzak (exceptions: UB Jesus, Broken Things and a good solo in Like Humans Do). Now that his neurotic register has matured into a tedious wail, Byrne doesn't even sound interesting as a lyricist anymore. His lyrics were always functional to his voice, the voice of a frustrated generation. Now his is the voice of a brainless yuppie.

Byrne's Lead Us Not into Temptation (Thrill Jockey, 2003) is superficially a movie soundtrack but actually a tribute to his homeland, Scotland. Thus the number of Scottish musicians (from Mogwai, Belle and Sebastian, and Appendix Out) who were engaged. Thus the pastoral feeling exhuding from many of the mood pieces (Body in a River, Seaside Smokes, Sex on the Docks, Mnemonic Discordance), despite a strong, American (Tom Waits-ian) undercurrent. Not to mention the very technique used to compose them (a Cage-ian set of instructions for the musicians). The fusion of cultures is also evident in the arrangements that juxtapose piano, accordion and strings to a very American instrument such as the saxophone. After 13 instrumentals that deserve less and less attention, the album delivers two songs, Speechless and The Great Western Road, that easily steal the show. And thus the album sounds more like a joke than a statement.

Once In A Lifetime (Warner Bros, 2003) is a 3-CD set anthology.

David Byrne's Grown Backwards (Nonesuch, 2004) is a tribute to different melodic styles of the past, from opera to Tin Pan Alley to Brazilian pop. Not only is it trivial and uninspired: it also proves Byrne was always overrated as an arranger. As a guitarist, he delivers an inspired solo in Empire.

Brick (Rhino, 2005) is a boxed set of all Talking Heads recordings.

In 2008 Byrne turned an entire building (an abandoned building in New York's waterfront) into an orchestra. This was the first time that Byrne the visual artist and Byrne the composer met. Throughout his career Byrne had kept the two careers carefully separated.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (2008), the second collaboration with Eno, was a cold and surgical affair conducted across the ocean, with little emotional involvement. Eno uses all the tricks up his sleeve to make Byrne's songs sound more than trivial lullabies. Pleasant but uneventful where the first collaboration, permeated by the spirit of punk and the new wave, had been unpleasant and eventful. The guitar solo of I Feel My Stuff is not enough.

Here Lies Love (2010), a collaboration with Fatboy Slim, a concept album about Philipino politician Imelda Marcos mostly sung by female vocalists, is a festival of kitsch (the Hawaian-style melody over Caribbean rhumba of Here Lies Love, the percussve and poignant You'll Be Taken Care Of (with Tori Amos on vocals), the orchestral aria worthy of a Broadway musical of The Rose Of Tacloban, the Aretha Franklin-esque soul of Don't You Agree, the imitation of Dusty Springfield-era ye-ye singers of How Are You), but it gets serious when one least expects it (the harrowing vision of Order 1081 packaged as easy-listening muzak for the vocals of Natalie Merchant). Byrne sings the soaring and country-ish A Perfect Hand, one of the highlights with the propulsive and sly Men Will Do Anything, and the festive lullaby from the Pacific islands of 16 (never so big). The musical excerpted from this album premiered in 2013.

Despite the good guitar work in Who, Love This Giant (2012) was another failed collaboration, this time with St Vincent.

In 2016 David Byrne collaborated with Mala Gaonkar to create "Neurosociety", an 80-minute immersive theater performance.

American Utopia (2018), the first solo album from David Byrne in 14 years, mostly co-written with Brian Eno, is a lightweight pop affair, with the pounding industrial techno and I Dance Like This, the festive singsong Every Day is a Miracle and the catchy country-flamenco Gasoline and Dirty Sheets (a bit reminiscent of Los del Rio's Macarena). The album hatched a show with the same title that traveled around the world and reached Broadway in 2019. The show included famous songs from his Talking Heads days and became a Spike Lee film in 2020.