How Music Works (30 page)

fortable in the studio by now; much of the alienation and terror had worn off.

When we had finished the overdubs and the singing on that batch of songs,

we let Eric Thorngren start mixing them while we went into the adjacent live room and began rehearsing another album’s worth of material that I’d written for the movie. These would be recorded with my “guide vocals,” but in most

cases it would be the actors who would later sing the songs, replacing my

voice singing over our tracks.

This was all very workmanlike, and by the time
Little Creatures
, the first of these records, came out, I was already in Texas preparing to shoot the

movie,
True Stories
. I took the multitrack tapes of our backing tracks for the movie songs to the Dallas set and added some local Texas flavor—fiddle and

pedal steel on some songs, Norteño accordion on another, a gospel choir on

yet another. The actors from the movie came into a local studio in Dallas and sang as well.

They didn’t sing live when they were being filmed—they lip-synched,

as I’d been doing in music videos for a few years. Lip-synching was an old

Hollywood musical technique that allowed the audio part of performances

to be more consistent, as everyone mimes to pre-existing recordings. It also enabled the camera and other departments to plan, down to the second, how

long or involved each shot might be, since they can time each bit of the audio recording. The camera might plan a dolly shot for a particular lyric, and by using these recordings they’d know how long they had, down to the second.

One might sacrifice some spontaneity and happy vocal accidents with this

approach—it’s not entirely without its downside—but it also meant that all

the takes would match, something that’s hard to do in a performance unless

there are multiple cameras on a shoot. Recently I was involved in a film by

the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, who wanted a performance by my band,

which consisted of me, a rhythm section, and six string players. Rather than have us lip-synch, he wanted to film it live, so we’d be performing and recording at the same time as the cameras ran. This approach is more authentic—

the sound is actually us playing and singing—but it’s possible that artifacts of the documentation of a live performance (the less than pristine sound, for example) might be distracting to the viewing audience. In the screening I saw, the sound mixer had “helped” the reaction of the audience of extras later by DAV I D BY R N E | 165

adding in the applause and shouting. And it worked! I believed the hype as

much as a potential movie audience presumably would. The scene was defi-

nitely more exciting; even knowing how all the parts were put together, I’m as easily manipulated as anyone else.

PARIS, AN AFRICAN CITY

After
Little Creatures
and
True Stories
, Talking Heads wanted to return to the more collaborative writing approach we’d used before—but

with some adjustments. Instead of going into the studio with absolutely no

songs, as we’d done on
Remain in Light
and some other records, we decided that we’d improvise some grooves and riffs ahead of time and choose the

best of them as the foundation for studio recordings. I recorded some of

these rehearsal jam-fragments on audio cassettes, and by cueing up specific

moments I managed to string together a few sequences that could be used to

make a song structure. We’d learn how to play a bit of fragment A, then we’d move on to a bit of riff B, then go back to A, and then on to C. In this way we already had some song framework—the material for what might become

verse and chorus sections. Still no words or top-line melodies, though. I’d

do those later, as I had before.

Over the years I’d been to a number of Paris clubs to hear music with the

late Jean-François Bizot, who had a magazine called
Actuel
that I admired.

We’d see Cuban or African bands or singers, and we’d eat at African res-

taurants. The African Diaspora was turning Paris into a hub that featured

some of the best African music in the world—many of the best musicians had

moved there, or spent much of their time there. I proposed to Talking Heads

that we record in Paris to take advantage of what seemed to me like a special moment and to work with some of those musicians. Not to pretend to be an

African band, but to see if something new—a third thing—could emerge.

It helped that we already had basic parts and structures to play—a minimal

foundation, but one that could be built on.

We worked at Studio Davout, a former movie theater out on the Péri-

phérique. The room was immense, unlike most New York studios, and we

were going to use digital recorders, which made us feel that our record was

going to sound sparkly fresh. As an ensemble, we were all playing at the

166 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

same time, and there was enough distance between us that we could hear

and see each other but still have some acoustic separation.G Our new pro-

ducer, Steve Lillywhite, enjoyed having some of that comforting isolation

between instruments.

The local musicians, among them guitarist Yves N’Djock, percussion-

ist Abdou M’Boup, and keyboard player Wally Badarou, were great. They

were professionals, very much in demand locally. They could adapt to styles

outside of the traditions they had grown up with, and their response to our

music was also entirely one of enthusiastic adaptation and accommodation.

There was a new development in my writing for this record. Though I

knew it might present problems when the time came to write the melo-

dies and, even worse, the lyrics, I either bravely or foolishly decided to put together non-repeating sequences based on our instrumental sections. The

passages I proposed we play in sequence would be similar to one another in

certain ways, but they’d also keep changing and evolving as the song went on.

Your typical pop song has a verse section, then a chorus section that is often bigger and might contain the “hook,” then back to the verse arrangement, and
G

DAV I D BY R N E | 167

the whole thing repeats again. There are variations on this structure, but it’s fairly pervasive—even opera arias repeat sections this way. But what if each section, rather than being identical, were instead a stepping stone, a variation and elaboration leading to another similar but slightly different section, and there were no clear repetitions? I liked this idea. It proposed a song structure that was more like a conversation or a narrative. As a listener, you’d be on familiar ground and accompanied by familiar faces, but the landscape and

settings would keep changing.

One new song, “Cool Water,” maintained a repetitive rhythm, but the key

changed over and over until the very end, when it settled on a big G major chord.

Other songs, such as “The Democratic Circus,” also proceeded through a series of similar but distinct sections. By the end, you were somewhere very different from where you’d started, but each step along the way was gradual and logical.

Not every song worked like this, but I was curious to see if I could gently break the routine of slipping into familiar song structures without things sounding “difficult.” Sometimes the usual verse-chorus verse-chorus-bridge pattern could seem a little predictable—and, as I’d learned, your attention can wander when you know what’s coming.

I improvised vocal melodies over the recorded tracks, just like I had in

the past. We made rough mixes and then took a break, as before, while I

sequestered myself and wrote words to match these “vocals.” I remember

coming up with the words for the song “(Nothing But) Flowers” while driv-

ing around suburban Minneapolis. My wife at the time was working on a

theater project there, and the only gear I needed to write lyrics was a cas-

sette player to play the tracks for inspiration, another small one to record my lyric ideas, and a pad of paper to write them down on. I could work anywhere that I wasn’t going to be bothered—anywhere no one would hear me

singing little fragments over and over, trying different words out.

It wasn’t surprising that while driving around the suburbs, not all that far from the Mall of America, I began to imagine a scenario in which the economy had changed and the malls and housing developments had all begun to

crumble and devolve to a prior state. The twist was that this scenario allowed me to also frame the song as a nostalgic look at vanishing sprawl, a phenomena I hadn’t thought that I was terribly sentimental about. It was obviously ironic in intent, but it also allowed me to express a love and affection for aspects of my culture that I had previously professed to loathe.

168 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

NEW YORK, THE SECRET LATIN CITY

For the Talking Heads record that was eventually titled
Naked,
I brought in Angel Fernandez to arrange Latin horns for “Mr. Jones”; I had also recently

recorded a duet called “Loco de Amor” with my idol, the Queen of Latin music, Celia CruzH—a kind of salsa-reggae song for a movie soundtrack. But my love

for Latin music hadn’t quite been quenched. I was still grooving to those

records, particularly the older ones. At home and on the road I played them on a boombox and danced around to them in hotel rooms or rented apartments.

I didn’t know the right steps, but no one was watching.

I decided in 1988 that I would try to make a pan-Latin record, to dive

into that world using a batch of songs I’d written as a foundation. I’d gotten into the habit of visiting Latin clubs and continued to immerse myself in the old records—it was all part of the history of my city, New York, so why not

partake of it? Some songs had words and vocal melodies already, and others

were instrumental tracks with verse and chorus sections in place. Jon Fausty, who’d recorded so many classic New York salsa records, joined Steve Lillywhite and me, and we decided to ask some experts how best to rhythmically

and musically approach and develop my demos. Fausty brought in Milton

Cardona and José Mangual Jr., two amazing percussionists from the New

York salsa scene, to listen to my musical sketches and recommend appro-

priate approaches to rhythms and arrangements. I knew I wanted to include

grooves drawn from a wide swath of South America—a cumbia rhythm from

Colombia and a samba from Brazil, as well as

the classic
son montuno
and cha-cha grooves

that were the base of the Afro-Cuban base of

New York salsa. I was being pretty ambitious.

Latin musicians generally tend to specialize in

one or another of these styles; salseros don’t

usually play sambas, just like blues-rock gui-

tarists don’t often play speed metal. But we

recruited players from all around the New

York metropolitan area, where pretty much

every kind of musician from the New World

H

could be found, and in this way we began the

advance work.

DAV I D BY R N E | 169

We organized a series of recording sessions to lay down the rhythmic

and harmonic beds for these songs—we wouldn’t worry about brass or

strings or other arranged parts yet. Usually in the rhythm section there

would be three percussionists working side by side, plus Andy González

laying down a bass part on an electric upright and Paquito Pastor on piano.

We were recording on a digital reel-to-reel recorder, like we had on
Naked
, though in retrospect this might not have been the best idea. The promoters

of this new technology advertised a more accurate and pristine sound, but,