Byrne & nonsens & Ball & Eno

 Fra interview med David Byrne i Rolling Stone (og hvornår, hvordan kan man se hans Spike Lee-instruerede koncertfilm? helt ærligt!)

The lyrics to one of your Talking Heads songs, “I Zimbra,” borrow from a nonsense poem by Dadaist poet Hugo Ball. How do you know when it’s time to stop making sense?
Never. My daughter has a young child, and I’m proud that I’ve shown him how to work a salad spinner with his head.

It was Brian Eno who suggested you adapt a Dada poem, leading you to write “I Zimbra.” What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned from working with him over the years?
We tended to work in a different way each time we worked together. There was the stuff we did with Talking Heads, that’s one thing, but when we worked together on this My Life in the Bush of Ghosts record, it was like a round robin, where one person makes a move, and then the other person makes a move that reacts to that one, and you go back and forth like that until you’ve built some kind of edifice based on all your little reactions to things you’ve done. With some of the other projects, there would be much more division of labor. With one album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, he had done all this music that he didn’t know what to do with, so I just said, “I’m not going to touch the music, but I’ll write words and melodies over top of it, but I won’t do any music myself.” By making that kind of tacit agreement, and saying, “I’m not going to mess with your stuff, but I’m going to just add on top of it,” that worked out really well. We discovered different ways of collaborating each time.

Mine yndlingssange om intethedsrejser / trip på stedet)

1. intethedsrejse - tekstforfatter: H. Rasmussen

Petersen og Poulsen
og Pallesen og Piil
tog ud en dejlig sommernat
i Posemandens bil.

Bilen havde ingen hjul
og heller intet rat,
men det var osse lige fedt,
for det var nemlig nat.

Skoven var en sølle skov,
for der var ingen træ’r,
men det var lige fedt med det,
for det var dejligt vejr.

Og Petersen og Poulsen
og Pallesen og Piil
har aldrig haft en bedre tur
i Posemandens bil.

2. trip på stedet - tekstforfatter: D. Byrne

Well we know where we're goin'
But we don't know where we've been
And we know what we're knowin'
But we can't say what we've seen
And we're not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out

We're on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Takin' that ride to nowhere
We'll take that ride

I'm feelin' okay this mornin'
And you know
We're on the road to paradise
Here we go, here we go

We're on a ride to nowhere
Come on inside
Takin' that ride to nowhere
We'll take that ride

Maybe you wonder where you are
I don't care
Here is where time is on our side
Take you there...take you there

We're on a road to nowhere
We're on a road to nowhere
We're on a road to nowhere

There's a city in my mind
Come along and take that ride
And it's all right, baby, it's all right

And it's very far away
But it's growing day by day
And it's all right, baby, it's all right

Would you like to come along
You can help me sing this song
And it's all right, baby, it's all right

They can tell you what to do
But they'll make a fool of you
And it's all right, baby, it's all right

There's a city in my mind
Come along and take that ride
And it's all right, baby, it's all right

And it's very far away
But it's growing day by day
And it's all right, baby, it's all right

Would you like to come along
You can help me sing this song
And it's all right, baby, it's all right

They can tell you what to do
But they'll make a fool of you
And it's all right, baby, it's all right

We're on a road to nowhere
We're on a road to nowhere
We're on a road to nowhere

We're on a road to nowhere

1 amerikansk helt der hedder David - med kor på

Der er slet ingen gåseøjne tilbage i denne version (find selv Jessica Langes version i American Horror Story, som vi lige sad og så

Busterske Byrne

Så halvdistræt Talking Heads-koncertfilmen Stop making sense! på YouTube og tænkte (med hele BK's kortfilms-produktion, anmeldt til Ekko, i frisk erindring): Hvor er egentlig David Byrne enormt Buster Keaton-agtig, hvis ikke direkte -inspireret, deadpan svingende rundt med sin krop - se bare, hvordan han omgås den lampe i "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)":

David Byrne er ugens konspiration

David Byrne er overalt i mit liv disse dage; han optræder hvidhåret i den åndddsvagt fine og fint åndssvage  film This Must Be The Place og synger titelsangen, der jo er en gammel Takling Heads-klassiker, der igen og igen popper op i filmen i forskellige udgaver, lidt ligesom titelsangen i Robert Altmans The Long Goodbye (min yndlingsfilm som bekendt):

og i dag faldt jeg over bog-formateringen af hans egen fornøjelige film True Stories fra 1986, der foruden manus og stills indeholder kuriøse avisklip (Sande Historier) og pokerfjæsede mini-essays apropos filmens motiver, og bl.a. dette:

Conspiracies

It's not what you know, it's who you know. Everybody believes in some conspiracy or other.  The ones you believe in seem perfectly plausible. The ones you don't believe in seem like they were thought up by a bunch of nuts and kooks. Can one person be a conspiracy? was supermarket barcoding prophesied in the Bible?
  Is it true that a very large percentage of government leaders went to a very small number of prep schools in the East. Sure, they hire each other. Sure, they appoint each other to official posts. So it's true. The world is run by the student council in high school. But those guys didn't go to your high school or mine. It's the high school acsorss town that runs verything. Shakespeare was heavily into conspiracy. Everybody would like to conspire against everybody else ... if we could get away with it, if we could get the chance.



- men jeg stadig lystlæser mig gennem How Music Works; jeg er kommet til side 191 i kapitlet "in the Recording Studio", det handler om Talking Heads i studiet med Brian Eno producing:

Eno was the one who encourarged us to mess with the sounds after they were recorded. He'd done a little of that on our previous record, but now the gloves were off. The furthest we went was on the song "drugs". We had initially recorded a fairly straightforward backing track that seemed a bit conventional, so w began to mute some of the instruments, sometimes just silencing specific notes. This made some parts open up; there were more gaps, more air. I had a recording of koalas that I'd made while we were on tour in Australia (they mainly grunt and snort, in contrast to their cutesey appearance), and that got addded in here and there. The grunts worked like indertiminate animal answers and echoes to my singing. More sounds went on - an arc-like melody created using an echo machine, and then a guitar solo at the end that was made by selecting fragments from a number of improvised solos. Finally, I sang the song after jogging in the studio, because for some reason I wanted to be out of breath. Of course, I was singing the same words and melody as I had been on the earlier, straighter version of the song, but now to a vastly alterede musical track - a fact that also affected how I sang. The song, as it was released, was an arrangement of sounds that one would never have come up with in rehersal or sitting writing with a guitar. It could only have been created in the studio. As Eno observed at the time, the recording studio was now a compositional tool.

To citater om falsk forkerthed

So why is the show so often portrayed as a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarassment to womankind? It's a classic misunderstanding, I think, stemming from an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicit about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior.

- Emilly Nussbaum om Sex in the City  i The New Yorker

Willie Nelson's Stardust was an inspiration, as were Philidelphia soul songs, bossa novas and songs  by my favorite Barzilian and Latin singers and songwriters. But I didn't play any of them in public. They felt delicious on the tongue, but I didn't get them all right. I didn't grow up on those songs, but I began to feel an appreciation for a beautiful melody and harmonies - harmonies in the choird voicings and not just in what a second singer might sing. Beauty was a revelation, and these songs were unashamed to be beautiful, which was a difficult thing to accept in the world of downtown musicians and artists. Anything that sounds or looks beautiful would seem to that crowd to be merely pretty, shallow, and therefore deeply suspect - morally suspect even, I found out. Noise, for them, is deep, beauty shallow.

- David Byrne i sin herlige (e-)bog How Music Works