1. Home
2. My Big Nurse
3. I Feel My Stuff
4. Everything That Happens
5. Life Is Long
6. The River
7. Strange Overtones
8. Wanted For Life
9. One Fine Day
10. Poor Boy
11. The Lighthouse

Eno:
This record started life as a dinner conversation: I was in New York, having dinner with David and some other friends, and happened to mention that I had a lot of music which I had intended to make into songs but never succeeded with. David volunteered to give them a try. By and large, though, we stuck to our separate territories: I generally did music, he generally did lyrics and vocals. That arrangement seemed to work.
When we started this work, we started to think we were making something like electronic gospel: a music where singing was the central event, but whose sonic landscapes were not the type normally associated with that way of singing. This thought tapped into my long love affair with gospel music, which, curiously, was inadvertently initiated by David and the Talking Heads.
The first gospel song I ever really responded to (‘Surrender to his will’ by Reverend Maceo Woods and The Christian Tabernacle Choir) was one I heard on a distant Southern American radio station whilst in Compass Point, Nassau - working with Talking Heads on the album ‘More Songs about Buildings and Food’. Being with them and becoming aware of their musical interests had opened my ears to some kinds of music I hadn’t really been noticing up to that point - including gospel. So it was fitting that the circle was closed on this record.
As a foreigner in New York - which was where I ended up living shortly after ‘More Songs’ - I was surprised by how little attention Americans paid to their own great indigenous musical invention: gospel. It was even slightly uncool - as though the endorsement of the music entailed endorsing all the religious framework associated with it. To me (thanks to Reverend Woods) gospel was a music of surrender, and the surrendering rather than the worshipping was the part that interested me. This idea has informed my music ever since: I guess it’s the reason I use modes and chords which are easy to follow and easy to harmonise with. I want the music to be inviting, to offer you a place inside it. I think David responded to this with sensitivity and skill, and his natural edginess made those familiar progressions sound new to me.
Brian Eno
London

Byrne:
A couple of years ago I passed through London and, having reconnected with Brian Eno when our Bush of Ghosts CD was re-released We had dinner one night and then the next afternoon I popped round his office/studio to hear what he’d been up to.
Just before we parted I recall Brian mentioning that he had a lot of largely instrumental tracks he’d accumulated and since, in his words, he “hates writing words” I suggesting I have a go at writing some words and tunes over a few of them and we see what happens. I suggested that if he didn’t like the result that would be that.
Brian send me CD w some instrumental tracks- stereo rough mixes- a bit later and I listened to them on and off, trying to get a sense of what kind of story this music was trying to tell. It wasn’t ambient, and I sensed that a song structure might emerge from these very evocative seeds. Emergence is a popular word these days, but it does almost perfectly evoke the way I think musicians and songwriters “allow” what lies latent in a basic musical kernel to grow into something only hinted at in the humble beginnings. Of course, without the vague and fuzzy humble beginnings there would be no final song, so writers and musicians often are quoted as saying they feel only partially responsible for the creation of the plants they’ve grown and nurtured.
I eventually wrote back to Brian, after living with some of his music for almost a year, and said I got a sort of folk-electronic-gospel feeling from his tracks, and suggested that my lyrics and melodies might reflect that, and did that direction seem OK?
I attacked the first one, which I think was called And Suddenly on Brian’s track list. I’d just finished reading Dave Eggers book “What is the What?”, about Valentine and his hallucinatory and horrific journey as a very young man that took him from his destroyed village in Darfur to Atlanta Georgia and beyond. Valentine’s story was harrowing but also beautiful, uplifting (in a non corny way) and at times even funny. I think I might have still been under the influence of his story when I sat down in front of my microphone.
The result became “One Fine Day”. I sang a few harmonies in the choruses to make it sound better and send it off to Brian..
We were both thrilled- here was the gospel-folk-electronic aspect I at least had heard hints of had come to life- articulated. The words had some Biblical allusions, but nothing too overt. We agreed to continue, for now.
In the coming months I did an event at Town Hall about bicycles and invited the Young at Heart choir to participate singing the Queen song “Bicycle Race”- as an encore we did “One Fine Day”, which had an added resonance when performed by a choir whose average age is around 80.
I wrote and recorded some more- My Big Nurse and Life Is Long may have been the next couple I finished writing. It soon became apparent that we were not only happy with the results but we had found our road, and would go down it further. We agreed on a fairly clear division of labor- music Brian, vocals and lyrics Byrne.
These harmonic foundations of some of these songs are often like those of traditional folk songs, country songs or gospel before some of those styles got harmonically sophisticated. Brian’s chord structures were like nothing I would have chosen by myself, so I was pushed in a new direction, challenged. This, of course, was good- as the challenge wasn’t so much technical as emotional- a challenge to write simple but not corny, basic but heartfelt. The results, in many cases, were uplifting, hopeful and positive- even though there were lyrics about cars exploding, war and similarly dark scenarios.
These songs have elements of work we’ve both done previously, no surprise there, but maybe something new has emerged as well. The tone and uplifting emotional feeling of a lot of the stuff- where does that come from? In these “troubled times” especially? The Bush era was not a particularly hopeful time for many of us, so where did all this exhuberance and hope come from? Some of it, some of the lyrics and melodies, as I hinted at earlier, were an emergent quality of the music- so my writing was a response to what I sensed lay buried in the music. My work was to sing and speak what was originally non verbal. IN the end we have made something that neither of us could have made ourselves.

DB
Hells’ Kitchen NYC July 08