![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Photograph: Xander Deccio/imageSPACE/SilverHub/Rex/Shutterstockġ7 David Byrne and Fatboy Slim – Here Lies Love (2010) As it lurches from great to grating – on I Dance Like This, this happens in the space of one song – you could never accuse Byrne of resting on his laurels. And yet it is still sprinkled sparingly with magic, not least the wistful Dream Operator.Ī collaboration with Brian Eno that also enlisted Sampha and Oneohtrix Point Never, American Utopia attempts to salvage something positive from Trump’s first year in power, a risky undertaking that perhaps inevitably misses as often as it hits. The weakest Talking Heads album, it feels simultaneously laboured and undercooked: the sound is leaden Puzzlin’ Evidence and Papa Legba amount to padding. Over 40 years, Byrne has shown gratitude and delight, mixed with embarrassment and fear, for his adopted country.The soundtrack to Byrne’s directorial debut was made as the band was falling apart and it is tempting to say you can tell. A few years after 9/11, Byrne told an interviewer he had “a little bit” of empathy for people who commit acts of terror against the US. In the 1986 album and film True Stories, he depicted small-town Americans who, he says, “had invented odd ways of being that were completely original, but it was all working out fine for them”. In “The Big Country”, from 1978, a man flies over the heartland and says disdainfully: “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.” Two years later, in “Listening Wind”, Byrne imagined an aggrieved man in a poor, developing country who builds mail bombs to kill American colonialists. ![]() For an artist who’s thought of as a global cosmopolitan, he’s written a lot of songs about America. Byrne was born in Scotland, moved with his family to Baltimore when he was eight, and didn’t trade his green card for United States citizenship until 2012. It is, though, an album about America, written by a guy who’s foreign in several ways. (An early draft of the song “Here” included the phrase “sound of gunfire off in the distance”, which he used in 1979 for the Talking Heads song “Life During Wartime”.) He wrote the lyrics before the election, and even took some from nearly-ancient notebooks. In some ways, this process has less in common with the standard way of recording music than it does with the Willem de Kooning drawing that Robert Rauschenberg studiously erased in 1953, then named Erased de Kooning Drawing.īyrne has been clear in his hatred of the President, but American Utopia, he says, is not his “Trump album”. “It felt like we were collaging the record back together,” McDonald says. Then he and Byrne evaluated the competing tracks, decided which they liked best, deleted existing music they no longer loved (including, often, Eno’s), and sent the songs back to the collaborators who’d done the best job, with directions for further refinements. A 36-year-old Scotsman who’s worked with The xx, King Krule and Adele, and fell in love with Talking Heads while he was in art college, McDonald set up a kind of audition process, sending the songs electronically to different musicians, and instructing them to keep the structure, tempo and key, but “send me back a reimagined version of the song”. With enlisted his pal Rodaidh McDonald, who produced the record with Byrne and Patrick Dillett. ![]()
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