How Music Works (33 page)

they sent me sounded vaguely Talking Heads–like (hence their desire to

approach me, I suspected), now it was the same song, same tempo, same key,

but as a stripped-down house track. The resulting song, “Lazy,” was released to club DJs in the UK, and ever-so-gradually became hugely popular. (In the

UK and anywhere but in the United States, club songs can cross over and

become radio hits.) I was delighted, and no one ever complained that the

vocal sounded like it had been recorded on a laptop. The homemade record-

ing had quietly passed the litmus test. Now I knew that I didn’t have to use real recording studios for my work unless I was working with a sizable group of musicians, or with strings or live drums.

Not only were the demos for my newer songs all recorded at home, as

they had been for years, but now various vocals, instruments, and electronic sounds could all be recorded at home too—often serving as the framework

over which additional instruments were recorded in “real” studios. This did

not signal the end of the recording studio—lots of artists still use them

exclusively—but most emerging artists do exactly what I’ve been doing:

they use studios more sparingly than bands used to, and only when the

need arises. The big-studio era has ended; most of the ones in New York

have closed down. (Although, in a weird reversal, the few that are left are

now booked solid.) There are still times when I need to use a fully equipped studio for a project, but increasingly we keep the costs down by doing much

of the initial work at home. We still need the studios—we’d be in trouble if 180 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

they all vanished—but we’re not held captive by their costs and the prevail-

ing recording orthodoxies anymore.

These changes have had a pretty big financial impact on the recording

process. The cost of making records can now be so low—if you don’t count

the rare transatlantic flights I took for my recent record with Brian Eno, of course—that average musicians can pay for it out of their own pockets. This

means that when the time comes to think about a distribution arrangement,

you aren’t beholden to anyone. You don’t come to the table already in debt. In effect, the ease and facility of home recording made me rethink how one might survive in the music business, given the ongoing collapse of the old system.

It’s sad that just as it has gotten easier for anyone to make a record exactly in the way they envision, the traditional means of selling and distributing

music are becoming less viable. Increasingly, recordings are the loss lead-

ers for merchandise, live-performance tickets, and licensing opportunities.

Recording, which used to be basically the most important thing one did as

a professional musician, is increasingly just part of a larger package. That doesn’t mean everyone except a few pop stars will stop recording, but it does mean that the way a musician survives is no longer primarily via sales of

recordings. The era when all the various ways in which we hear and enjoy

music are secondary to the most well-known recording of that music might

be over. We soon might begin to view recordings as they were perceived when

they came into being, as fixed versions of compositions—but not as the only

or even the primary way the music is supposed to sound.

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c h a p t e r s i x

Collaborations

c h a p t e r s i x

Collaborations

The online music magazine
Pitchfork
once wrote that I would col-

laborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.1 This wasn’t intended

as a compliment—though, to be honest, it’s not that far from

the truth. Contrary to their insinuation, I am fairly picky about

who I collaborate with, but I am also willing to work with people

you might not expect me to. I’ll risk disaster because the creative rewards of a successful collaboration are great. I’ve been doing it my whole life.

I discovered early on that collaborating is a vital part of music’s essence

and an aid to creativity. Unless you’re a solo folk singer or a laptop jockey, live performance usually involves playing with other musicians. A successful ensemble inevitably requires a certain amount of push and pull and creative

compromise. Although there’s usually a hierarchy and often assigned parts

and arrangements, the idiosyncrasies of each player’s interpretations make

the sound of every group unique. And when an ensemble is also involved in

the creation and/or recording of a piece of music, those individual expressive tendencies are that much more apparent. Even if I wrote a song myself, then

played and sang it for Talking Heads or some other group of musicians on my

guitar, their individual interpretations, abilities, and ensemble skills would make their collective version and performance of that song different from

anyone else’s.

DAV I D BY R N E | 183

Players inevitably add things that the songwriter might not have thought

of, so you often end up with something very different from what a solo

musician would have arrived at on his own. Sometimes this new thing is

restricted by the players’ abilities and sensibilities, but rather than being a liability, these restrictions can actually be liberating. Odd that I’m more focused on the limitations than the fact that some musicians might be able

to play something better than anyone else. One adjusts to both the limita-

tions and particular talents of a given set of musicians. Writers and com-

posers learn to anticipate what is and is not likely to happen musically. Over time you internalize the tendencies and playing approaches of your fellow

players, and after a while you don’t even consider writing certain parts or

in certain styles, because the musicians you’re working with wouldn’t natu-

rally go that way. You play to their strengths. You don’t try to reverse the river, or get it to jump over a mountain, you harness its flow and energy to gently urge that it join up with other tributaries.

One might assume that having better players, with a higher level of

musicianship, means that a composer can be more adaptable, free, and

wide-ranging in what he writes. One might also assume that this would be

a good thing, but the conventional hierarchy of musical skills is deceptive.

Classically trained players often can’t get the feel of what may seem like a simple pop or funk tune, and a great rock drummer may play in time but

never learn to swing. It’s not that technical abilities are beyond some players; it’s more the sharpening of the ear and brain that happens over time.

We learn to hear (or not hear) certain things, different things. The classical players who think all popular music is simple tend not to
hear
the nuances involved, so naturally they can’t play very well in that style. Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects.

When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that’s when the details

take on larger meanings.

There is really no hierarchy in music—good musicians of any given style

are no better or worse than good musicians of another. Players should be

viewed as existing across a spectrum of styles and approaches, rather than

being ranked. If you follow this reasoning to the end, then every musician is great, a virtuoso, a maestro, if only they could find the music that’s right for them, their personal slot in the spectrum. I’m not sure I’m actually willing to go
that
far, but there may be a little bit of truth in the idea.

184 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

Many songwriters write in teams: Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and

Richards, Bacharach and David, Leiber and Stoller, Holland-Dozier-Holland,

Jobim and De Moraes, Rodgers and Hammerstein. One person might write

the words and the other the music, which is the division of labor I’ve often followed in my own collaborations. But just as often, the division of labor

is less clear—ideas may get passed back and forth, collaborators may work

on specific sections of a song. With some songwriting teams, the equality

between the collaborators is less than obvious, and it can seem as though

one of the partners was more of an instigator on a particular song than the

other. But the fact that there have been so many of these teams, and that they achieved such heights, seems significant.

There are obvious benefits to working in a team. Your weaker ideas might

get corrected. My original concept for “Psycho Killer
”
was to play against type and do it as a ballad, but when the other bandmembers joined in, it took a more energetic direction, which proved to be popular with our audience. There’s a good chance you might be inspired by ideas that originate outside yourself.

Music written by teams makes the authorship of a piece indistinct. Could

it be that when hearing a song written by a team, a listener can sense that

they aren’t hearing an expression of a solitary individual’s pain or joy, but that of a virtual conjoined person? Can we tell that an individual singer might actually represent a collective, that he might have multiple identities? Does that make the sentiments expressed more poetically ambiguous and therefore

more potentially universal? Can eliminating some portion of the authorial

voice make a piece of music more accessible and the singer more empathetic?

PLAYING WELL WITH OTHERS

Many of my songs were written without songwriting partners. Are they

less good than the ones where the job was split, or where a partner

modified, added to, or rejected my ideas, or I theirs? I can’t answer that, but certainly musical partnerships have often led me to places I might not otherwise have gone.

With Talking Heads we always collaborated on the interpretation, realiza-

tion, and performance of the music, even if I brought a finished song to the table. We all had similar things in our record collections—O’Jays, Stooges,

DAV I D BY R N E | 185

James Brown, Roxy Music, Serge Gainsbourg, King Tubby—so regardless of

the limitations imposed by our playing abilities, there was another set of

limitations—good ones, we felt—shaped by our collective musical tastes.

As much as we wanted to sound like something entirely new, we communi-

cated by referencing music that we all loved. An early Talking Heads song,

“The Book I Read,” had a middle section that to my ears sounded like KC and

the Sunshine Band, whom I liked, so that reference was, for us, a good thing.

No one else seemed to hear it, though. Perhaps my yelping vocal and other

factors obscured those influences and touchstones? Though we may have

combined those influences in a skewed and mangled manner, we could hear

bits of the music that had preceded us all over our material. In the absence of any formal training, this mostly unspoken set of references was how we

communicated. It’s probably what made communication and collaboration

possible for us in the first place.

After some years of a more or less traditional songwriting process—words

and music completed by one person, or finished words by one set to music by

another—Talking Heads evolved a kind of collaborative music-writing system

based on collective improvisations. Sometimes these jams would happen in a

rehearsal loft—the song “Life During Wartime” began as a one-chord jam with

no lyrics based on a riff I’d brought in, which was wedded to a second chord that became the chorus. Sometimes these improvisations and jams wouldn’t

happen until we were in a recording studio. In such instances, the writing and recording were simultaneous. Jazz players, of course, respond fluently to one another by improvising in their live performances and in their recordings. We, however, were fairly minimal about what we would contribute. The aim of our

improvising, probably inspired by our R&B heroes, was for each person to find a part, a riff, or even just a freaky honking accent, and then stick with it, repeating it over and over. So by improvisation I don’t mean long meandering guitar solos. Quite the opposite. Ours were more about hunting and pecking with the aim of “finding” short, sonic, modular pieces. These pieces were intended to interlock with whatever was already there, so the period of actual improvisation would be short. It would end as soon as a satisfactory segment was found.

Then we would shape those accumulated results into something resembling a

song structure.

In this system, one person’s response to another’s contribution could

shift the whole piece in a radically different direction—harmonically, texturally, 186 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

or rhythmically. Pleasantly unexpected surprises would occur, but just as

often they could seem like rude and arrogant impositions that missed the

significance and integrity of the preexisting material. The guitarist Robert Fripp added a part to the Talking Heads song “I Zimbra,” overdubbing a

weird harmonic ostinato that he played through the whole song. The whole

song! Initially that destroyed the song, and seemed like someone was being

willfully perverse. But, as it turned out, when used sparingly it added an

little psychedelic swirl to our Afro-pop groove, which put everything in a

new perspective. Is this disruption and destruction a risk worth taking?

Did the piece just get ruined, or did it really need to get radically rethought in order to go somewhere new and exciting? You can’t be too precious in

this process. For us, this method resulted in music in which the authorship

was to some extent shared among a whole group of people, though I still