davidbyrne – Jarrett House North

Exfiltration Radio: Byrne Unit

David Byrne—Talking Head, art pop auteur, Broadway star, prolific collaborator—arguably has more side quests in his career than anyone else. I’ve been collecting some of these for years, starting with a good friend hipping me to The Catherine Wheel and Forestry, and picking up a copy of the LP of Music from the Knee Plays many years ago.

This playlist has a bunch of odds and ends, obscure and not. There are no Talking Heads tracks here, but there’s a lot of everything else—classical compositions, collaborations with Brian Eno, De La Soul and St. Vincent, concert performances, remixes, and straight up weird stuff.

Balanescu Quartet, “High life for nine instruments” (Byrne, Moran, Lurie & Torke): David Byrne the classical composer is a hat he doesn’t wear often anymore, but his exercises in writing for traditional ensembles brought about this pretty great African-inspired string work, performed by the avant-garde quartet led by Alexander Bălănescu. I found this CD release on the Argo label when I was in college, which is how long I’ve been trying to figure out how to squeeze it into a mix.

Brian Eno & David Byrne, “America is Waiting” (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts): This track and “The Jezebel Spirit” (which I sourced as a remix from the 12″ EP release The Jezebel Spirit) come from the seminal electronic collaboration between Eno & Byrne, which we’ve talked about before and which has appeared on past Exfiltration Radio shows. Both tracks sample radio broadcasts which I haven’t seen identified, though other tracks on the album have turned out to have identifiable samples.

David Byrne, “Dinosaur”/“The Red House” (The Catherine Wheel): Byrne wrote and performed this score for the titular performance by Twyla Tharp; Bernie Worrell, Adrian Belew, Jerry Harrison, and Dolette McDonald all appear elsewhere on the album, but not in these songs (or “Big Blue Plymouth”; see below). Some mindbending sonic fun here.

David Byrne, “Things To Do (I’ve Tried)” (Music for the Knee Plays): I’ve written about this project before—a score for the plays that hang around the outside of Robert Wilson’s opera the CIVIL warS, the project was inspired by the sound of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and features New Orleans jazz-inspired songs, together with incredibly strange spoken word work from Byrne. Also appears on a past Exfiltration Radio show and an old mix.

David Byrne, “Strange Overtones (live)” (Everything That Happens Will Happen On This Tour): Byrne and Eno reunited on Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, which was unexpectedly joyful, in 2008. This version of the lead-off single came from a live performance recording and is pretty great, subtracting synths and adding in other instrumentation. Great Byrne vocal on this song-about-writing-a-song, which also features Mark De Gli Antoni (of Soul Coughing fame) on keyboards.

David Byrne, “Great Intoxication (live)” (Live From Austin, TX): Another live track, this one from an Austin City Limits performance that backed Byrne with the Austin-based tango string quartet Tosca. A great full-throated performance of this track from Byrne’s Look Into the Eyeball.

David Byrne feat. Ghost Train Orchestra, “Everybody Laughs” (Who Is the Sky?): The lead off track from Byrne’s latest album finds him in familiar lyrical and musical territory, which is to say in fine form.

De La Soul, “Snoopies (with David Byrne)” (and the Anonymous Nobody…): Until I started catching up with later day De La Soul, I had no idea Byrne had collaborated with them. A great song with a fantastic Trugoy the Dove verse.

David Byrne, “The Jezebel Spirit (remix)” (The Jezebel Spirit): See notes regarding My Life in the Bush of Ghosts above.

David Byrne, “Ava (Nu Wage Remix)” (Forestry EP): So you’re going to write a full orchestra classical score for a Robert Wilson theatre piece. What’s the right way to do a single from such a project? Well, getting Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto to do this remix is a pretty good start. One I found in college and listened to a lot.

Otto, “Accident” (Little Pieces): An odd composition of Byrne’s on this 2008 release, that I found while digging for a different work of his. Otto is an interesting ensemble, featuring cello, vibraphone, reeds, and slide guitar, and this work of Byrne’s fits in with much of his soundtrack work from this period.

David Byrne, “Don’t Fence Me In” (Red Hot + Blue): One of the all-time great charity collections, Red Hot + Blue launched a whole series, but it all began with this one covering the compositions of Cole Porter. Byrne’s performance incorporates the Brazilian rhythms he was working with in the late 1980s and early 1990s and a lot of subtext about the human pain surrounding the AIDS crisis.

David Byrne, “Big Blue Plymouth (Eyes Wide Open)” (3 Big Songs): See notes about The Catherine Wheel above. This mix of the song came from a twelve-inch EP that was released from the original album, with the songs that ended up being included in Stop Making Sense.

David Byrne & St. Vincent, “Road to Nowhere (live)” (Brass Tactics EP): I love this EP, which pairs the two collaborators with a brass ensemble. This version of “Road to Nowhere” is about as joyous as anything on record.

David Byrne, “City of Steel” (Sounds from True Stories): The short true story about True Stories is that Byrne wanted to release a soundtrack to his film of the same name, and ended up having to release a Talking Heads album; Sounds from True Stories features all the stuff that ended on the cutting room floor. Recommended for all the performances, especially this steel guitar rendition of “City of Dreams.”

Do not attempt to adjust your set!

BONUS: Still love the video for “Don’t Fence Me In,” which was profoundly moving when I saw it for the first time many years ago:

Old mix: faith and blues

When I got to the University of Virginia, I started buying much more music. Plan 9 (the original one on the Corner) was within walking distance, I had the mail order music clubs, I had neighbors with their own CD collections, and I started checking out different musical directions.

One of the directions that was new to me at the time was the blues. There had started to be some serious efforts to reissue and preserve old delta blues recordings, starting with the complete works of Robert Johnson and a series of box sets of artists on Chess Records. I found both available on the various CD clubs (probably Columbia, in this case) for a fraction of the list price, and started digesting the music by putting it alongside other blues that I understood better, namely jazz, the Rolling Stones, and folk music.

I might have been on to something. The Child Ballads that Dylan rifled for “Seven Curses” have a straight through-line to the blues. So does every single Leonard Cohen song. And the themes of death, guilt, and murder that snake through most of the rest of the tracks are all steeped in the blues. The outlier might be David Byrne’s “Make Believe Mambo,” but it works well melodically with the songs that surround it, and some blues are for dancing.

I note in passing that I made this mix in the late spring of 1992, long before Jeff Buckley covered the version of “Hallelujah” that appears on this mix as performed by John Cale and made it immortal. I always liked Cale.

Special shouts out in this mix to my upstairs neighbor in Harrison Portal at Monroe Hill for lending me the Rolling Stones compilation; to Greg for introducing me to Reckoning and Camper Van Beethoven in our first year; and to now-Bishop Poulson Reed for suggesting that we visit Preservation Hall on our visit to New Orleans while on the Tour of the South in 1992, where I heard the band play and picked up New Orleans – Vol. 4.

“Sweet Home Chicago” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
“Sympathy for the Devil” – The Rolling Stones (Beggars Banquet)
“Seven Curses” – Bob Dylan (The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3: Rare and Unreleased)
“Carolyn’s Fingers” – Cocteau Twins (Blue Bell Knoll)
“Suzanne” – Geoffrey Oryema (I’m Your Fan — The Songs of Leonard Cohen)
“Nigh Eve” – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
“Peace Like a River” – Paul Simon (Paul Simon)
“St. James Infirmary” – Preservation Hall Jazz Band (New Orleans – Vol. IV)
“So. Central Rain” – R.E.M. (Reckoning)
“Eye of Fatima, Pt. 1 & 2” – Camper Van Beethoven (Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart)
“Halo” – Depeche Mode (Violator)
“Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
“Hallelujah” – John Cale (I’m Your Fan — The Songs of Leonard Cohen)
“Kindhearted Woman Blues” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
“Make Believe Mambo” – David Byrne (Rei Momo)
“Creole Blues” – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
“Gimme Shelter” – The Rolling Stones (Let It Bleed)
“She Divines Water” – Camper Van Beethoven (Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart)
“Blues in the Evening” – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
“From Four Till Late” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
“7 Chinese Bros.” – R.E.M. (Reckoning)
“Who By Fire” – The House of Love (I’m Your Fan — The Songs of Leonard Cohen)
“Death’s Door” – Depeche Mode (Until the End of the World Soundtrack)
“Armistice Day” –Paul Simon (Paul Simon)
“Come On In My Kitchen” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
“Walkin’ After Midnight” – Cowboy Junkies (The Trinity Session)

You can listen to (most of) the mix on Apple Music:

Funkin’ for Bernie

David Byrne: Keep On Funkin’. Speaking of David Byrne and Bernie Worrell…

I was saddened to hear back in January that Worrell, who I’ve loved since falling upon his collaborations with George Clinton in Parliament, had been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Byrne participated in a fundraiser concert on Monday to raise money to help pay Bernie’s medical bills (aside: with Bootsy Collins, George Clinton, Living Colour, Jonathan Demme, Meryl Streep, Rick Springfield, Maceo Parker, Steve Scales, Bill Laswell, Mudbone, Fred Schneider, Bernard Fowler, Leo Nocentelli, Ronny Drayton, Melvin Gibbs, Jerry Harrison, Screaming Headless Torsos, The Woo Warriors, Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash, Nelson George, Marc Ribler, Paul Shaffer, and the Black Rock Coalition Orchestra in the house, I’d have loved to have been there).

Yesterday Byrne offered up a pair of remixed tracks of a song he wrote and performed with Bernie a while back. Is “How Does the Brain Wave?” the equal of Byrne’s early 1980s collaborations with Worrell, which include The Catherine Wheel and Remain in Light? Well, no, but they’re funky, so donate already.

The Catherine Wheel

I fell behind this week—thank our surprising April snow. So this is being posted on Wednesday and I’ll catch up.

David Byrne’s The Catherine Wheel is one of those works that pulled me all the way into pop music. If I had heard of Byrne or the Talking Heads before, it was picking up Remain in Light or hearing “Once in a Lifetime” on the radio. Then my friend Catherine gave me a mix tape that had “Combat” on it. I had to find more.

I turned up a copy of the CD after some searching (this was the early 1990s) and was hooked. I put “Ade” on a mix tape myself. And then I kind of forgot about it.

I went back last week and started listening to the album with new ears. It’s still amazing after all these years. A lot of insane Adrian Belew guitar, yes, but also some really crazy Bernie Worrell keyboard, and those drums…

And then there’s the performance context. The Catherine Wheel was composed as a ballet score for Twyla Tharp, and the video above has the whole blessed thing. I don’t know enough about modern dance to know if this is any good, but it pushes a lot of the same buttons for me that Home of the Brave does, and that’s a good thing. So enjoy.

David Byrne visits Newport News

David Byrne Journal: 09.21.2008: On the Road Again. I know that this post was primarily about the new show and not about David Byrne’s Life in the Bush of Hampton Roads, but I can’t resist the pointer:

In Newport News, a group of us biked to the beach on the banks of the James River — a long trip, mostly on local highways, passing chain restaurants, industrial parks, gas stations and a steak joint offering square dancing. The residential areas are tucked in behind these strips, I guess, as there were none visible from these connecting roads. There’s an airbase nearby as well. Fighter jets streaked overhead now and then. There’s no town visible in any direction, just endless sprawl. At one point we reached a crossroads, which appeared to be the remnants of a small town, now mostly converted to a row of antique stores, but still pretty quaint. Eventually we found a small beach next to a massive bridge beyond which lay a huge naval station and port. A few of us waded in the water as a film crew set up nearby to shoot a girl in Goth makeup for a TV commercial.

Having grown up in the residential areas tucked behind the strips, I would say, yes, he got it about right. I’d love to see a street map of where he went–Hilton Village, which was built to house sailors shipping out during WWI? It sounds as though he made it all the way over to the 664 bridge.

Very cool. I will say that performing with James Levine and other opera superstars, you get applause inbetween the classical reserve and the pop mania that’s described here. I’ve never been blown back by applause at one of our concerts, though.