This week’s mixtape is Chris Hansen approved! Truly! Would Chris Hansen steer you wrong? By the way, why don’t you head into the kitchen for some sweet tea and brownies?
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…)
When Kyle Vincent released his eponymous album on Hollywood Records in 1997, it looked for all the world that, after spending over a decade on a quest to earn himself a Billboard Top 100 hit, he was about to bring a dream to fruition. Unfortunately, that did not prove to be the case, but he made enough of an impact with the album’s single, “Wake Me Up (When The World’s Worth Waking Up For),” to show up on the radar of quite a few pop fans…including me. (Like you didn’t see that revelation coming up Main Street.)
Although Vincent’s stint on Hollywood Records only lasted for that one record, he didn’t let any moss grow under his feet. Indeed, he’d returned to the studio even before Hollywood went through the corporate restructuring that would cost both he and virtually every other artist on the label their deals. In the end, he released the follow-up to Kyle Vincent on his own label, SongTree Records, but it featured just as much gloss and sparkle as anything released on the majors that year.
Sadly, the sound of Wow & Flutter was a far cry from what the cool kids of the world were listening to in 1999. Their mothers, however, would’ve loved it…if only they’d had ample opportunity to hear it.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve often found myself listening to a song and thought, “My mom would like this,” and when I do so, I’m not thinking it in a sneering, disparaging way. On a Mother’s Day many moons ago, I made my mother a mix tape called A Little Bit of Mom Music, If You Please, and I filled it with songs by They Might Be Giants, The Beautiful South, the Cure, the Smiths, Captain Sensible, 10,000 Maniacs, the Blue Nile, and probably a dozen other artists…and she loved it. I think she played in the car until they finally upgraded from a cassette player to a CD player, in fact. Just because your parents might listen to music that you can’t readily defend in a court of cool – my mother’s love of Anne Murray is one which I’ve never personally been able to embrace – doesn’t mean that they can’t appreciate some of the tunes you’re grooving to, and Wow & Flutter is definitely a record that multiple generations can appreciate.
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 
