David Byrne

the Songs Of Byrne & Eno tour is AWESOME

That's good news! I'll be seeing that in March. How are the My Life in the Bush of Ghosts songs delivered in this setting, I'm v. curious to know.

there's only one Bush Of Ghosts song sadly, but it is remarkable. he does a hesitant intro trying to explain [I saw it at the Sydney Opera House, perhaps in other venues he trusts the audience better] that they made this record, but neither of them sing on it, and they took the voices from "found sounds", and it took a year to, what you would now call, "clear" the "samples," and it was a terrible pain, erm, well but anyway -- and then takes a deep breath and ROARS in full sung melody the radio preacher's words as the band swells in behind him.

That's "Help Me Somebody" I think... He sings the preacher's words!? Woah.

ha, yeah, those journals ... I want to go to parties at Caetano Veloso's house, too! Take me with you, Dave!

Jon Pareles of the NY Times makes David mad:

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2009/03/030209-nyc.html

excerpt from Byrne's blog and Pareles' review below that. I think the review of the current tour seems fair (I haven't seen the tour but if Pareles thinks it's too cute, that's his opinion. I have mixed views on Pareles' review from way back of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) :

C warned me that there was a not so complimentary review in the NY Times this morning, and advised me against reading it. I don’t read all the press and reviews we get, but as I do read that paper regularly, I would have inevitably stumbled upon it. Apparently the reviewer, Jon Pareles, loves the Bush Of Ghosts album and has some kind of nostalgia for those days. We all know music snobs who like to remind everyone that they heard so and so back when they were really good. This, however, is the same reviewer who leveled charges of “cultural imperialism” against Bush Of Ghosts in his Rolling Stone review back in the early 80’s. For years afterwards, almost every interviewer asked me to respond to his charge, and many press articles quoted it. It was like the joke about “When did you stop beating your wife?” — the charge was silly and ill-informed, but one was constantly put on the defensive, and even assumed to be guilty, simply by the question being raised. It was annoying, it lasted for years, and it hurt.

Given that track record, I guess 30 years from now he’ll figure out what this show was about.

I still haven’t read the review, and don’t intend to.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/arts/music/02byrn.html

So if I want to go with David to the parties in Brazil I just can't mention Jon Pareles or cultural imperialism I guess

"So, David, when did you stop robbing other cultures' musical heritage?"

it's cool if pareles wasn't feeling the show -- i had a good time when I saw it a couple months back. thought the band was good, dancers were fun and Byrne was engaging. Who knows, I might've reacted differently if I'd seen the big band Talking Heads play those songs back in the day. But it worked for me.

Saw the show in Belfast last night - it was fantastic. The big surprises were only one song from Bush Of Ghosts (wouldn't have been a surprise if I'd read this thread) and Burning Down The House, which Eno wasn't involved in. We got a full five songs from Remain In Light too, which was just incredible. I loved the choreography and the showiness of it all - it is a proper show, but the band is incredibly tight and funky as well so one is not at the expense of the other. Byrne doing both rhythm and lead guitar (great versions of Adrian Belew's solos from the Remain In Light songs especially) was very impressive. It was my girlfriend's birthday too and we are both massive Talking Heads fans so pretty much a perfect night out.

Looking forward to seeing what he writes about our fair city on his blog! He mentioned on stage that he and some of the band/dancers had gone cycling and got caught in the (torrential) rain so I'm sure it was a bit of a let-down.

sounds like the same show he did for free last night in prospect park. except for the final song, the new eno/byrne album songs pretty much blew compared to the peak era talking heads stuff. but the whole spectacle was so much better than i expected. dude has aged amazingly well. his dance moves and vocal hiccups could make up a master class in compelling frontman-ness

yeah, a couple months later, i think the live show was waaaay better than the new album. there are 3 or 4 tracks i love on it, but a good deal of it feels a little soggy. i actually like Byrne's last few solo records better, I think. but i agree -- dude is a wonderful performer, and there is something weirdly touching about him being so comfortable and relaxed onstage these days, compared to the super uptight Talking Heads days.

i thought the new stuff was alright. he and the dancers were fun. but it wasn't like a super-scintillating show.

i guess i wanted some harder funk

I thought about going but just couldn't bring myself to hear those new song live

songs, even, allegedly

he did the title track of the new one last as his third and final encore. it was the only one from that album i enjoyed. otherwise they were letdowns made interesting only by the choreography. same with "heaven," which sounds like a precursor to this latest album. but that is a minor complaint about a great free show. where i was sitting everyone was up and dancing during "i zimbra" and the biggies like "life during wartime." the crowd went nuts when our incredulity that he'd do "once in a lifetime" turned out wrong. total class act

The newly arranged "Born Under Punches" with killer bassline is the highlight of the current tour for me, dissapointed that he didn't include it on the live ep (prob. due to copyright/royalties issues since all the songs are byrne/eno on that one).

Is 'Born Under Punches' not being played the same way it was in the early 80s? It sounded very similar to the version on The Name Of This Band Is... anyway. Also that Rome show that's on Youtube.

i thought it was great but i might have been disappointed if i had paid money for it

as we were leaving we got approached by a guy who asked, "do you know where the david brian concert is?" we were standing like 100 yards from the bandshell and we sort of motioned behind us at the incredibly loud music, as in, the concert is right there, where all the music, and lights are coming from, and he gave us a confused look and goes, "but isnt that the talking heads?" <shrug emoticon>

that guy woulda been disappointed anyway - Byrne didn't play "Drugs"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bryan

Jon Pareles of the NY Times goes after Mr. Byrne again in his review of Bonaroo:

Mr. Byrne, performing songs he wrote with Brian Eno, last year and decades ago, in musically emaciated new arrangements and surrounded by Broadwayish dancers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/arts/music/15bonnaroo.html

Emaciated!

didnt go to Brooklyn show. He & entourage popped into my friend's bar after.

i mean, it's David Byrne in '09 fer chrissakes

too bad that old geezer popped into your friend's bar, huh

Emaciated!

"Broadwayish"

"white hair doesn’t disqualify a headliner." - I have no idea what Pareles looks like, but I'm pretty sure Byrne is better-looking, rite?

Don't know, but I think Pareles was just trying to point out that Bonaroo this year had older headliners as well as younger ones. I've never been there or studied the bill of prior years, so I don't know whether this is a new thing or not.

mean, it's David Byrne in '09 fer chrissakes

Morbius, if you look upthread you will see a post where Byrne is quoted complaining about a Pareles Rolling Stone review from way back when. So this is an ongoing thing between the 2 of them.

The January, 1987 issue of OMNI Magazine included a cover story titled, "14 Great Minds Predict the Future." OMNI asked influential people from a variety of fields what was in store for humanity in the year 2007, twenty years into the future. There were predictions about everything from peace in the Middle East to 3D televisions.

David Byrne, lead singer and songwriter of the Talking Heads, gazed into his crystal ball to write about pop art, the future of television, and why computers will never help the creative process. With the benefit of hindsight it's a little hard to believe that Byrne was so pessimistic about the potential for computers as a creative tool, especially when futuristic designs for computers were getting so many others excited. An excerpt from the OMNI piece appears below.

David Byrne, Lead Singer, Talking Heads

I don't think computers will have any important effect on the arts in 2007. When it comes to the arts they're just big or small adding machines. And if they can't "think," that's all they'll ever be. They may help creative people with their bookkeeping, but they won't help in the creative process.

The video revolution, however, will have some real impact on the arts in the next 20 years. It already has. Because people's attention spans are getting shorter, more fiction and drama will be done by television, a perfect medium for them. But I don't think anything will be wiped out; books will always be there; everything will find its place.

Outlets for art, in the marketplace and on television, will multiply and spread. Even the three big TV networks will feature looser, more specialized programming to appeal to special-interest groups. The networks will be freed from the need to try to please everybody, which they do now and inevitably end up with a show so stupid nobody likes it. Obviously this multiplication of outlets will benefit the arts.

I don't think we'll see the participatory art that so many people predict. Some people will use new equipment to make art, but they will be the same people who would have been making art anyway. Still, I definitely think that the general public will be interested in art that was once considered avant-garde.

Hindsight....

He's still blogging on occasion I see:

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/

LOL at Charlie Crist apology on that blog. Does EVERY Republican think it's okay to use music without clearance?

Whne OMNI interviewed me for that article, all I talked about was my condominium on the moon.

Not much blogging from him lately, but he's got an album with St. Vincent, "Love This Giant" coming out in September plus a North American tour. He's been doing some work with her since 2010 it seems. The song "Who" has a standard Byrne style melody.

Talking Heads were a massive band for me and probably the first band that I got all the studio albums of (I'm probably missing lots of odds and ends tho).

I like Catherine Wheel and Rei Momo.

I thought The Forest might have been a heavy metal album (judging from cover art, and that I thought Byrne might try something unpredictable as that) but it was a really odd theatrical album, very nice in places. The people he was working with on Catherine Wheel insisted on something more pop and I think that maybe this was an attempt to do something more avant garde that he originally had an itch for when doing something for theatre?

The "David Byrne" album is really patchy, but there are a few real standouts, some which seem unusually bleak for him, I'm sure there was lyrics about some miserable future. I found these parts really compelling.

But of all my teenage favorites, my Talking Heads/Byrne enthusiam seems to have diminished a lot in retrospect, I didnt think I'd bother with any new Byrne stuff but now I'm reconsidering. He doesnt have as big a back catalogue as I thought (unless you count soundtracks for film and theatre, I'm not sure how songlike most of them are)
I hate to say it but I still like the early nervous Talking Heads stuff better, although I love the idea of Byrne becoming serene as he appears today.

I've been reading around the various Byrne threads and seen the discussion of accusations of him being a cultural imperialist. Is this just a lazy attack that is bound to get people excited by this sort of controversy? Is there anything more to this? Can someone specifically tell me what he was supposed to have done wrong?
I've seen quite a lot of vague accusations of this sort in all sorts of instances; I sometimes get the impression that people think you cannot interact with another old foreign culture without doing something wrong (even if those older cultures had appropriated something from other cultures a long time ago, which you could endlessly speculate about).

"another old foreign culture"? I think you're over-simplifying the cultural appropriation arguments a bit

byrne's solo work has been diminishing returns for a long time but the album with St. Vincent is really good, but mostly because of her.

""another old foreign culture"? I think you're over-simplifying the cultural appropriation arguments a bit"

Probably. That's partly why I want to hear more about the arguments, I havent been able to find any real detailed criticism about this matter.

the David Byrne record is quite good, yes.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/color-guard-is-david-byrnes-new-project-yes-color-guard/

I guess he and the guards will be doing halftime appearances at US football games next

https://youtu.be/euEgyXoOonk
First song from upcoming album

working with OPN and Jam City has me interested at the very least

I like Byrne, but those vocals are pretty annoying

He was scheduled yesterday to have done a “Reasons to be Cheerful “ lecture in NYC, and his upcoming tour for his new American Utopia album is scheduled and on sale in some places

Apparently Airhead worked on it as well, so apparently this will be the art-pop Yeezus in terms of producers

It sounds pretty good, but I feel like the pop structure of it gets in the way of elaborating on that principal idea. It gets better after the two minute mark. I think the vocals are ok.

compression and eq on those vocals pretty grating imo

Satellite radio played a song from his new album, a cover of Whitney Houston I Want To Dance with Somebody.

Huh. I want to say he did that live a lot in, like, 2003? Late '90s? A while ago.

Belew was on Tom Tom Club and Jerry solo records but never on a Byrne solo record, I think?

belew was on the catherine wheel

Ah of course. In the interview, Belew jumps from Remain to Tom Tom Club to solo Jerry.

tbh there are too many albums to discuss in this interview and some of the best and most detailed bits are about his cincinnati beatles cover band.

definitely give byrne props for luaka bop stuff.

Belew also talked about his good relationship with Jerry and playing on the Crash Test Dummies record, which I missed in the Jerry thread.

Thanks for the tips, sic---"the five C20th": you mean they did five albums in the 20th Century?

That’s right. I might try and relisten this week to see if I really can throw together a good C80 and YSI to Leo. Have never heard the unreleased new EP that got added to the US version of the third album!

has it been mentioned that belew and jerry harrison are playing together at hardly strictly bluegrass? https://www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com/artist/jerry-harrison-adrian-belew-remain-in-light/

Speaking of former punk guys showing up as producers on '90s albums: Belew produced Jars of Clay.

The band is promoting a new website "with music, videos, photos, merch and bios written personally by David, Chris, Tina and Jerry."

Byrne's peronally written bio is brief, but mentions Frantz several times (Providence: "I believe Chris suggested we put a band together to play at school dances"; Manhattan: "Seeing bands playing original music at our local bar (CBGB) I believe Chris suggested we form a new band and audition once we had enough material.")

Frantz's bio is longer, but his recollections square with Byrne's ("I invited some of my friends to form a band to play at school parties and dances. One of those guys was David Byrne. [...] Tina and I graduated from RISD in 1974 and moved to New York City where we reunited with David and moved into a raw loft at 195 Christie Street. I asked David to form a new band").

So fwiw, Byrne seems to be giving credit where due there.

Harrison's bio lists his production credits! ("Crash Test Dummies, Live, The Violent Femmes, The Bodeans, Poi Dog Pondering, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, The Verve Pipe, Rusted Root, O.A.R, The String Cheese Incident, Stroke 9, Josh Joplin, The Von Bondies...")

They all seem determined to play nice. Tina credits David for teaching her "the basics of rock song structures."

btw - that site has tons of rapidly flashing images, if you're sensitive to / irritated by those (as I am)

seen and not seen

A more hooked nose

Website seems pretty nice. Despite their feud, they've all been good at maintaining their back catalog and doing whatever needs to be done to keep their legacy visible (short of reuniting and touring). IIRC all four are always involved in their reissues, whether it's Stop Making Sense or the two box sets they've put out.

I wonder how they share profits. Cheap Trick, for example, Bun E. is no longer in the band, but he's essentially a co-owner of the band that still gets a cut. Same with the members of Journey, many of whom are long gone but still make money from Journey tours, iirc.

Jerry was interviewed by Maron a couple months ago too. Very good interview - especially for the Jonathan Richman stories. Byrne remains an enigma. Also, I had no idea Harrison had worked with Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard?
https://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-1351-jerry-harrison

after my startup is funded, we'll all own a share or two of the next Journey tour.

and Talking Heads Reunion Tour contracts. We could write and sell them to naive young fans that don't understand -- David does not value friendship.

Excellent interview. Harrison involved in a start-up for antivenom!

but will it work on Chris' words?

You can get a totally fun, solid Best Of out of the five C20th albums and b-side/soundtrack cuts.

Tom Tom Club track for the Party Girl soundtrack was discussed on its own thread years ago but it deserves a re-up here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbfPBPu0mSk

Today I learned about the CD+G Museum, which collects the video files of graphics-enhanced CDs that were around for a heartbeat in the late 80s and early 90s. Always wondered what was going on in my copy of Talking Heads' "Naked." https://t.co/YiQFrOG9te

— Mark Athitakis (@mathitak) September 23, 2022