By 1989, Lyle Lovett had already been kicking around for a couple of years. He cut a unique figure from the start, a Texan Eraserhead with a knife-slash mouth, and there was a buzz about his songwriting chops based on tunes like “God Will” and “Pontiac” — perfectly-crafted little gems, both gorgeous and unflinching. But there was, in his earlier records, a sense that Lyle was still a work in progress. His persona shifted variously to the traditionalist and ironist camps. With Lyle Lovett and His Large Band, from its ruthlessly literal title on down, he gets definitive by getting ambiguous. It’s a neat trick.
“Here I Am”(download) stakes out Lovett’s unique territory. A stomping, shouting blues vamp is continually interrupted by a series of surreal, goofy asides. It’s pure vaudeville, of course — extending from a tradition that traces back to “The Arkansas Traveler” and the minstrel show — but rendered with such deadpan earnestness that it creates its own interzone of doubt and indeterminacy: Is he serious? Is he kidding? Maybe both, or neither.
That’s a delicate balancing act. The key is to never let the audience see you wink, and it’s the rare artist who can pull it off consistently. Randy Newman used to own this patch of real estate, back in the 70s — Tom Waits, too; but Newman’s satire has grown blunter with the years, and Waits’s songs have opened up emotionally. David Byrne can still manage it, on occasion, mining the common ground between yearning and absurdity with nerdy intensity.
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to see David Byrne live in concert. It was purported to be a celebration of the work he did with Brian Eno, famed producer and musical renegade, encompassing Eno’s production on classic Talking Heads albums as well as their collaborations like My Life In The Bush of Ghosts and a new, currently digital-only release Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. The show was composed of Byrne, a backing band, a trio of backup singers and a trio of interpretive dancers, and while that sounds like a bad, pretentious idea the whole thing came off very entertaining and ended up being a fine night of live music.
Another big plus was the lack of squirrels in the road. Come on, if you go to see bands with an extensive and memorable back-catalog you know about the squirrels. A pace is building, the classics are rolling out and the audience is having a grand old time, then suddenly the performer announces, “We’d like to play something from our new album” and suddenly it’s all screeching brakes and momentum sliding to a halt. Damn squirrels, they’ll do it every time.
That’s what’s so great about the new collaboration: nary a squirrel to be found. All the songs, even if they’re not immediate attention-getters, are very good and surprisingly song-like. I hesitate to use the word ‘conventional’ because it would tend to paint Everything That Happens… as by-the-numbers, which it definitely isn’t. These songs sat side by side with tunes like “I, Zimbra,” “Once In A Lifetime,” and even “Help Me Somebody” and never interrupted the flow, never incurred massive pee-breaks and beer raids. The album is an album, and not an excuse to tour based around weak product, thank God.
The story goes like this: Byrne found himself in the company of Eno unexpectedly, as both hadn’t co-created in awhile. Eno, over the years, made his bones by becoming an ambient artist as well as the big-time producer of several classic albums, including U2’s The Joshua Tree. Byrne mixed his sound with massive multiculturalism and founded the Luaka Bop label. Now here they were in the company of each other and the inevitable happened: one asked the other if they were up for doing something. The result? Eno sent Byrne some instrumentals he had worked up, yet these frames were distinctively song-based. (more…)
Back in 1978, the Talking Heads were playing clubs that barely had functioning toilets and drew small crowds to hear their progressively styled poly rhythms. Flash forward to 2008, and the Talking Heads are no more, but David Byrne is, and the music he created with his band and producer Brian Eno has gone uptown. Byrne played at the swanky Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco to a sold-out crowd on Monday, and it was clear the moment he took the stage that he was expecting the audience to be a bit more sedate. However, the crowd was in no mood to politely sit in their seats — they gave Byrne a standing ovation at the outset, and then began to crowd the outer edges of the hall to dance feverishly for the next two hours.
The opening song, “Strange Overtones,” was a mid-tempo number from his new collaboration with Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, and it got some heads nodding and bodies swaying in their seats. A couple of women in the front row did a kind of hippy-dippy/body and hands undulating dance — only to be told by an usher to sit down or move to the side of the hall. This was, after all, Davies Symphony Hall, and dancing in front of high-paying patrons was bad form. Ha! (more…)
By 1989, Lyle Lovett had already been kicking around for a couple of years. He cut a unique figure from the start, a Texan Eraserhead with a knife-slash mouth, and there was a buzz about his songwriting chops based on tunes like “God Will” and “Pontiac” — perfectly-crafted little gems, both gorgeous and unflinching. But there was, in his earlier records, a sense that Lyle was still a work in progress. His persona shifted variously to the traditionalist and ironist camps. With Lyle Lovett and His Large Band, from its ruthlessly literal title on down, he gets definitive by getting ambiguous. It’s a neat trick.
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to see David Byrne live in concert. It was purported to be a celebration of the work he did with Brian Eno, famed producer and musical renegade, encompassing Eno’s production on classic Talking Heads albums as well as their collaborations like My Life In The Bush of Ghosts and a new, currently digital-only release 
