How Music Works (28 page)

kind of performance. We would start and stop the “singer” (which was now

the tape with the vocal on it) as if he or she were responding to our music, coming in with a particularly emotional line as the track modulated up to a

new key, for example. These “performances” were witnessed only by us and

one or two others, but as we’d fly those vocals in, there was a vibrant energy present, as if we were actually singing ourselves.

Sometimes, at night, back in our apartments, we’d record radio sermons on

the cassette recorders of our late-seventies boomboxes. The quality of these recordings was sometimes dubious (on “Come With Us” we had to make the

background hiss that was due to intermittent radio reception part of the dark ambience of the song), but overall we came to realize that these vocals recorded on cassettes sounded fine—or at least good enough (there’s that phrase again).

High-fidelity, we realized, was a vastly overrated convention that no one had bothered to question. Sometimes the harsh megaphone-like quality of these

vocals actually had much more character than a “good” recording. One was subliminally aware that these vocals were “secondhand” or disembodied, and this quality made them feel like transmissions from a desperate planet—ours. At

times, the vocals we used came from the records we’d been passing around

for the past year. Arabic pop records, field recordings, ethnographic recordings, gospel records—all were being scoured for possible vocal “samples” now that

we realized this would be the unifying aspect of this record.

The amazing thing was how easy it was (well, relatively), and how much

the vocals felt like they had been performed or “sung” with the “band.” Part of this effect was, of course, entirely in the ear of the beholder—a phenomenon we noticed early on. The mind tends to find congruencies and links where

none previously existed—not just in music, but in everything. More than just 154 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

a way of tricking the mind, we also felt that, when successful, this effect also

“tricked” the emotions. Some of the tracks generated genuine (to us) emo-

tional reactions. It felt like the “singer” really was responding to the music we had made, and vice versa, in a way that often elicited powerful feelings—

uplift, ecstasy, dread, or sexy playfulness. Perhaps it’s wrong to say the emotions were being “tricked”; maybe these passionate voices and rhythms trig-

gered emotional responses because our brains have neurological “receptors”

awaiting musical and vocal combinations just like these, and we provided the necessary materials for that process to take place. Maybe that’s what artists do. A big major chord is a “trick” too.

We gravitated toward passionate “vocalists,” and this made it seem to us

that the natural cadences and metric of any impassioned vocal—even ones

spoken, not sung—might be in some way innately and intrinsically musical.

It’s easy to hear this musical speech in the sermon of a gospel preacher where the line between singing and speaking is intentionally fuzzy, but it’s there in talk show hosts, political speeches and, well, maybe in all our vocalizations.

Maybe the difference between speech and music isn’t all that great. We infer a lot from the tone of someone’s voice, so imagine that aspect of speech pushed just a little further. The weird cadences of a Valley girl, for instance, might be viewed as a species of singing. The malls of Sherman Oaks are a setting for a kind of massed choir.

Some people find all this disturbing. In the West, the presumption of a

causal link between the author and performer is strong. For instance, it’s

assumed that I write lyrics (and the accompanying music) for songs because

I have something I need to express. And it’s assumed that everything one

utters or sings (or even plays) emerges from some autobiographical impulse.

Even if I choose to sing someone else’s song, it’s assumed that the song was, when it was written, autobiographical for
them
, and I am both acknowledging that fact and at the same time implying that it’s applicable to my own biography. Nonsense! It doesn’t matter whether or not something actually hap-

pened to the writer—or to the person interpreting the song. On the contrary, it is the music and the lyrics that trigger the emotions within us, rather than the other way around. We don’t make music—it makes
us
. Which is maybe the point of this whole book.

Granted, a writer has to draw on some instinctual understanding of a

feeling in order to put something with some emotional truth down on paper,

DAV I D BY R N E | 155

but it didn’t necessarily have to happen to them. In writing and performing

music we are pushing our
own
buttons, and the surprising thing about
My
Life in the Bush of Ghosts
is that vocals that we didn’t write ourselves, or, in the case of the found vocals, didn’t even sing, could still make us feel such a gamut of emotions.

Making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge

up emotions in performer and listener alike. Some people find this idea repulsive, because it seems to relegate the artist to the level of trickster, manipula-tor, and deceiver—a kind of self-justifying onanist. They would prefer to see music as an expression of emotion rather than a generator of it, to believe in the artist as someone with something to say. I’m beginning to think of the

artist as someone who is adept at making devices that tap into our shared

psychological make-up and that trigger the deeply moving parts we have in

common. In that sense, the conventional idea of authorship is questionable.

Not that I don’t want credit for the songs I’ve written, but what constitutes authorship is maybe not what we would like it to be. This queasiness about

rethinking how music works is also connected with the idea of authenticity.

The idea that musicians who appear to be “down-home,” or seem to be con-

veying aspects of their own experience, must therefore be more “real.” It can be disillusioning to find out that the archetypical rock-and-roll persona is an act, and that none of the “country” folk in Nashville really wear cowboy hats (well, except during their public appearances and photo shoots).

This issue was resolved years later by electronic and hip-hop artists,

whose music was often either rarely played by them (in the case of hip-hop

artists) or who, like Eno and I on this record, remained more or less face-

less. Electronic and lounge artists like NASA, Thievery Corporation, David

Guetta and Swedish House Mafia often use a variety of friends and name-

brand singers on their tracks and almost never sing on their own records.

Now it has become accepted that the author can be the curator, the guiding

sensibility, rather than the singer.

After finishing an initial version of
Bush of Ghosts
in 1980, we set about the task of “clearing”—getting permission to use—the found vocals. This

is a common practice nowadays, and there are established companies who

do nothing but clear samples, but back then, no one that we approached for

the rights to their recordings had any idea what the hell we were up to. The record sat on the shelf ready to go while the phone calls and faxes went back 156 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

and forth. Most of the vocals we hoped to use were cleared, but in a couple of cases we were denied rights and were forced to find alternatives. Sometimes

this resulted in newer, better tracks, and sometimes not. In the meantime, we had returned to New York and begun work on the next Talking Heads record,

which would become
Remain in Light
.

MODULAR MUSIC (
REMAIN IN LIGHT
)

Eno and I were full of enthusiasm after everything we’d learned and expe-

rienced making
Bush of Ghosts
, and we felt confident that a Talking Heads sort of pop record could be made using some of the same recording and composing techniques. The rest of the band agreed that starting with a blank slate would be a creative and revolutionary way to make our next record. We didn’t intend to use the found voices or cardboard drums this time, but the process of creating repetitive tracks and then making sections by switching instruments on and off using the mixing board was retained.

We gave ourselves two weeks to build this instrumental scaffolding, but we

knew we wouldn’t finish the record—the vocals would have to come later. In

a nod to a strange ritual of the era, we recorded these initial tracks at a studio in the Bahamas. Maybe a decade earlier, the idea had taken hold that making

pop records should be like sequestering oneself to write the Great American

Novel. Studios were built in idyllic locations—Sausalito, deep in the Rocky

Mountains, in a barn in Woodstock, New York, a French château, St. Martins,

Miami Beach, or Nassau—with the idea that a self-contained musical act

would hole up there, avoid distractions, and emerge with a polished finished product. There were often beaches nearby, and sometimes meals were communal and catered. (The financial climate for the music business was obvi-

ously different then.) Isolation and time to focus has a lot to recommend

it, but many bands (my own included) found ways to achieve those things

through much less expensive means.

We worked rapidly. One or two people would lay down a track, usu-

ally some kind of repetitive groove that would last about four minutes, the

presumed length of a song. Maybe it would be a guitar riff and a drum part,

or maybe a sequenced arpeggio pattern and an intermittent guitar squeal.

Others would then respond to what had been put down, adding their own

DAV I D BY R N E | 157

repetitive parts, filling in the gaps and spaces, for the whole length of the

“song.” As we’d listen to one part being recorded, we’d all be scheming about what we could add—it was a kind of game. This manner of recording had

the added advantage that we weren’t trying to replicate the sound of the live band. We hadn’t gotten attached to the way these songs and their instruments and arrangements sounded in performance, so in some ways the con-

flicts we had confronted when we’d first entered a recording studio years

previously were bypassed.

After the tracks began to fill up, or when the sound of them playing simultaneously was sufficiently dense, it was time to make sections. While the groove usually remained constant, different combinations of instruments would be

switched on and off simultaneously at different given times. One group of

instruments that produced a certain texture and groove might eventually be

nominated as a “verse” section, and another group—often larger-sounding—

would be nominated as the “chorus.” Often in these songs there was no real

key change. The bass line tended to remain constant, but one could still imply key modulations, illusory chord changes, which were very useful for building excitement while maintaining the trance-like feeling of constant root notes. Up to this point, there was still no top-line melody, nothing that the singer (me) would put words to. That came later.

So far, this was all very much like the process Eno and I had used in

the
Bush of Ghosts
sessions. But we weren’t going to use found vocals this time, so when these sections had been created, Eno or I would go into the

studio and sing to them, improvising a wordless melody. Often it took a

few tries before arriving at a suitable melody for a verse and a different one for the chorus. Sometimes even harmonies, also wordless, were added, to

give the impression of a rousing chorus. We then did rough mixes of these

“songs”—including these gibberish vocals—for everyone to listen to, while

I took them home to write actual words. We agreed to reconvene in New

York after I’d finished my lyric-writing assignment. On a previous record,

the song “I Zimbra” actually got left as gibberish—or rather, the gibberish

early-twentieth-century Dada poet Hugo Ball had written seemed a perfect

fit. But now I wanted to find real words to substitute, which was going to

be tricky.

How did this recording process affect the music? A lot. For starters, the

constant loop-like grooves on these tracks and the unchanging bass line

158 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

that carried through many of the songs meant that tricky structural devices

like meter changes or half measures were unlikely to occur. Complex chord

changes of the sort one might hear in ordinary pop songs, bossa novas, or

standards were very unlikely, too (usually there were no chord changes at all).

Such devices are often employed to keep a song interesting, so we had basically abandoned the rules we had previously accepted for determining structure and arrangement. While punk rock was celebrated for needing only three chords,

we had now stripped that down to one. This fairly strict self-limitation might seem perverse, as it restricted the kinds of top melodies one might write,

and a melody that doesn’t change keys has a hard row to hoe—it runs the

risk of being overly repetitive and boring. But using only one chord has its advantages, too: more emphasis gets placed on the groove. Even if a given song wasn’t particularly aggressive rhythmically, the groove tended to feel insistent, and you noticed it more. This made the tracks feel more trance-like, somewhat transcendent, ecstatic even—more akin to African music or Gospel or disco,

though the way we played placed us well outside those traditions. Not only

were these tracks groove-centered, they were also very much about texture.

The changes from one section to another were sometimes driven more by