How Music Works (29 page)

textural variation than by melody or harmony—more like minimal classical

music or some traditional forms of music around the world than the rock and

pop traditions we came out of.

I’m exaggerating a little here—there were certainly other kinds of pop

music in North America that worked this way. Many James Brown songs,

Hamilton Bohannon, and some Mississippi blues guys basically groove,

twist, and elaborate around one chord. We knew and loved much of that

music too. We had, it seemed, taken the long way around to arrive at a place that, structurally at least, we should have been slightly familiar with already.

Like that T.S. Eliot quote about arriving where we started and knowing it for the first time, we were essentially reinventing something we already knew,

something right there in our own backyard. But of course, in the reinvention process we got much of it “wrong,” and, for example, the version of funk we

ended up with was skewed, herky-jerky, and somewhat robotic. The result

was something with that familiar structure, but now made of strange and

different parts.

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MUSIC WRITES THE WORDS

Significantly, rhythm and texture are the two most difficult aspects of

music to express in conventional Western musical notation. These quali-

ties, some of the most resonant and important in contemporary popular

music, and in some ways the most “African,” were excluded from, or maybe

simply outside of, the system by which music was traditionally taught, passed on, notated, discussed, criticized, and—very important—copyrighted. The

copyright of a musical composition is based on the top-line melody, the

specific harmonies that support it, and, in the case of a song or opera, the lyrics. There is no acknowledgement of groove, sound, texture, or arrangement—all of which are features of the recorded music of our era that we

listeners have come to savor and identify as integral to an artist’s work. This failure would lead to some conflicts down the road. The drummer on James

Brown’s tune “Funky Drummer,” Clyde Stubblefield, claimed that he was due

some percentage of the money received by Brown and his publishers when

that song (the drum break especially) was sampled by countless acts in recent years. Legally, Stubblefield’s contribution fell outside of what one would traditionally call “composition,” but realistically those were his drum breaks that everyone wanted. Determining and attributing these contributions is complex. One could argue that it was Brown who suggested that Stubblefield take his famous break, and similarly, that if it wasn’t on a James Brown record, no one would ever have heard it. Stubblefield has suggested that he should be

compensated, but the issue has not been resolved.

I felt that the melodies and the lyrics I was going to write for
Remain in
Light
had to respond to all these new (for us) musical qualities. One might even say that the recording process, because it privileged trance-like and transcendent music, was about to affect the words that I would gravitate toward.

The gently ecstatic nature of the tracks meant that angsty personal lyrics like the ones I’d written previously might not be the best match, so I had to find some new lyrical approach. I filled page after page with phrases that matched the melodic lines of the verses and choruses, hoping that some of them might complement the feelings the music generated.

On the following page is a small sample of some of the phrases I jot-

ted down in this manner for the song that eventually became “Once in a

Lifetime.”F Judging by the fact that on this particular page there are actual 160 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

F

stanzas and couplets, I suspect I was pretty far along in the process—earlier pages would have included anything, absolutely anything, that fit the meter

and syllabic form, and might not have included any rhymes or be on a trajec-

tory toward a subject. What’s with the color coding? I believe that the red

texts were the culled favorites. I still often write in very much the same way today, but without the color coding and minuscule handwriting.

I tried not to censor the potential lyrics I wrote down. Sometimes I would

sing the melodic fragments over and over, trying random lyric phrases, and

I could sense when one syllable was more appropriate than another. I began

to notice, for example, that the choice of a hard consonant instead of a soft one implied something, something emotional. A consonant wasn’t merely a

formal decision, it
felt
different. Vowels, too, had emotional resonances—a soft
ooh
and a pinched nasal
aah
have very different associations. I felt I had to adhere to whatever syllables seemed to fit the existing melody best, so

I’d listen to the gibberish vocals respectfully and let those be my guide. If I seemed to instinctively gravitate to an
aahh
on the gibberish vocal mix, I’d try to stick to that sound in the lyrics I was writing. More restrictions, but okay.

In keeping with the rapturous nature of some of the tracks, I was also

drawing lyrical inspiration from the radio preachers I’d been listening to and that we’d used on the
Bush of Ghosts
record. At that time, American radio was a cauldron of impassioned voices—live preachers, talk-show hosts, and

salesmen. The radio was shouting at you, pleading with you, and seducing

you. You could also hear great salsa singers, as well as gospel being broadcast straight from the churches. I can only imagine Eno’s reaction, coming from a country with four fairly restrained radio stations! I don’t listen to the radio much anymore, though. There is still variety on some stations, but it’s mostly been homogenized, like so many other parts of our culture.

I wrote the verses of “Once in a Lifetime” at my home on East Seventh Street in the East Village. I started by taking on the character of a radio preacher I’d heard on one of my cassettes. There was a serious use of
anaphora
—employing the same phrase to begin each sentence. It’s a common device that preachers

use, and it brings their speechifying one step closer to poetry and song. One or two fragments that I used—the repetition of the phrase “You may find yourself,” for example—were straight lifts from the radio preacher, but from there I’d improvise and change the focus from a Christian message to, well, I wasn’t sure at first what I was getting at. The preacher was focusing on the lack of 162 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

spirituality in material striving; he may have begun by telling the listener that there was nothing wrong with living in a shotgun house, a house in which all the rooms are in a line so straight, you could shoot a shotgun straight through (you see them a lot in New Orleans). So the mention of the beautiful house, the beautiful wife, and the trappings of an ideal life situation would have been a natural segue for me. I’d get myself worked up, pacing back and forth, breathing in synch with the preacher, phrases would come into my head and I’d jot them down as quickly as possible. I maybe went off topic once or twice.

The lyrics for another song, “The Great Curve,” were inspired by Rob-

ert Farris Thompson’s writings about African spirituality, and the feminine

goddesses that survive today in remnants like Mother Nature or Yansan and

Oshun in Afro-Atlantic cultures. My lyrics, though they didn’t all start out addressing that subject, began to approach and circle around that idea, so I tried to urge them closer, and to reject ones that seemed to go in a different direction. It was tough work—I had to reinvent myself as a lyricist to match those tracks. I wasn’t writing about my own anxieties anymore—I had to

leave much of that behind. Not every track we recorded became a finished

song. There were some really wonderful tracks that I just couldn’t find words to fit. But we had ample music, so when we went back into the studio I could sing the words I’d written, get everyone’s reaction, and if one set of lyrics worked, we’d record a properly sung vocal and then move on.

We spent maybe two weeks in New York recording vocals and some addi-

tional overdubs—Adrian Belew’s amazing guitar solos, some trumpets and

percussion. It was all fairly exciting. But when the record finally came out in 1980, radio stations balked. I suspect it may have been the videos on MTV

that introduced that record to many people. MTV had just launched, and they

were starving for content; they’d play pretty much any decent material they

were handed. Not too many people had cable TV back then, so MTV had no

hesitation about playing the same videos over and over. Hard to believe, but at the time, if you made almost any halfway interesting video you could possibly have it up and running on cable TV almost instantly. For me it was a

godsend—a way to reincorporate my art-school roots into the music side of

things. The video for “Once in a Lifetime” and the one for “Burning Down the House” were made fairly cheaply, and they both went into pretty heavy rotation.

Years later I gave MTV an animated video for a song by a Brazilian singer, Jorge Ben (“Umabarauma”), and even that got played.

DAV I D BY R N E | 163

Arranging songs by switching tracks on and off like we did for
Remain in
Light
(and on the two records that followed) was very much what hip-hop artists were doing at the same time: looping a groove to make an underlying

bed and then making sections by nominating other sounds and parts to go

in designated places. Samplers didn’t really exist yet, so even the hip-hop

artists were looping somewhat manually by playing break sections of records

over and over and then layering other sounds and vocals on top of the breaks.

I went a bit further texturally with this process on
The Catherine Wheel
, a score I wrote for choreographer Twyla Tharp in 1981. On
The Catherine Wheel
, I worked with some musicians outside my band—ney player Richard Horowitz,

Adrian Belew, who came back after touring with us, drummer Yogi Horton,

and Bernie Worrell, who added some keyboards. I got to pay back writer and

drummer John Miller Chernoff, whose book on African drumming had inspired

both Eno and me, when I invited him to play some African drum patterns on a

prepared upright piano. The strings inside the piano were muffled so the sound didn’t ring out, and the result was pitched thuds. It worked.

TWO RECORDS AT ONCE

We did another record,
Speaking in Tongues
, that continued with this idea of using improvised initial riffs and gibberish vocals as a guide for lyric

writing. That record turned out to be the most commercially successful so far.

After completing a tour that was filmed (
Stop Making Sense
), I got it into my head to direct a movie. Talking Heads, as a band, was fairly popular by then, and I figured if the movie had some songs scattered throughout, it would help me get financing. I was right, but it still took a long time to get the funding and production in place, so in the meantime, I wrote some songs that could

be used for a new Talking Heads record. I decided to write them ahead of the recording sessions, in what now seemed to us the old-fashioned way—playing

a guitar and singing along. Sometimes I wrote the songs by using two boom-

boxes. I recorded the guitar chords on one machine, then played that back and sang along, recording the result of that live “overdubbing” on a second machine.

Other times I used a Tascam, an attaché-sized 4-track recorder that used ordinary audiocassettes played at high speed. The quality wasn’t great, but as a writing tool and a way to make demos for the band, it was sufficient.

164 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

We decided to economize. After rehearsing the new songs, we recorded

them relatively quickly and conventionally in New York. We were fairly com-