So, I got to meet David Byrne tonight, and do thirty seconds of fanboy gushing. He listened politely but clearly just wanted to go home. His Songwriting Hall Of Fame lecture was pretty revelatory. He played demos of Talking Heads songs in various stages of development, and showed in-progress lyric sheets too. This whole thing of building songs out of one-chord jams by muting and unmuting tracks? He and Brian Eno were solidly thirty years ahead of their time. Once In A Lifetime got zero radio play because it was too black for white radio and too white for black radio. The MTV video is what really put it on the map. Which, have you seen it? Its nuts. https://youtube/watch?v=98AJUj-qxHI Lets see, he also said that Psycho Killer was his attempt to imagine a collaboration between Randy Newman and Alice Cooper, and that he wanted it to be an introspective ballad. Take Me To The River wasnt even the first Al Green song in the Talking Heads repertoire, they did Love and Happiness too. He, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz deliberately invented Normcore in 1976. Dont Worry About The Government is one of the funniest songs ever written. Many of those early Byrne songs are hilarious. His dad was an electrical engineer and built homebrew guitar pedals for him. He was a fan of the early Bee Gees, and admires the way their lyrics make no sense whatsoever on the page. He sometimes writes by improvising words over beats he makes on the computer, but didnt say what he uses to make them. Im dying to find out. Ableton? GarageBand? Fruity Loops? Anyway, a great night out.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 04:19:46 +0000
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