I’ve never really gotten Brian Eno.
I like his work as a producer (including memorable albums by U2, Talking Heads, Sinead O’Connor, Paul Simon and Coldplay) but the few times I’ve heard him step out from behind the boards he puts me to sleep.
Eno goes for that whole ambient soundscape thing and while I’m sure his version of it is deeper and more meaningful than most, it still reminds me of those stand-up CD stands you see at Target hawking titles like Tranquility and A Spring Morning.
OK, it’s getting weird now. Here we have another instance of the Random iTunes Fairy honing in on the most popular track from the selected album.
To be fair, it’s not as if ‘She’s Mad’ was a runaway hit, but this track was the only single released from David Byrne’s 1992 album, Uh-Oh, and it had some success on the Modern Rock chart. So if a conspiracy theorist were to predict which track from Uh-Oh would be picked, this would be it.
Took a little break over the weekend (hope you’re enjoying the Dylan series) but I have one loose end to tie up on the David Byrne front.
Three years after Look Into the Eyeball, Byrne returned with one of his strongest albums, 2004’s Grown Backwards. The album is ambitious and yet mostly low-key, favoring acoustic guitars and soft rhythm sections to the wild experimentation of previous albums.
Not that he doesn’t experiment… Byrne tackles two straight up arias, one in French and one in Italian, the former a duet with Rufus Wainwright. Hearing Byrne’s quirky whine wrapping around those melodies is both shocking and moving.
In 2001, David Byrne released his fifth solo record, Look Into the Eyeball. It was a bit of a letdown following the heights of Feelings but it’s a solid collection nonetheless.
If Byrne tries something new on every album, on this one it was his liberal use of a string section on most of the tracks. Today’s SOTD is one of the few exceptions. But although it isn’t representative of the album as a whole, I chose it because it marks a departure for Byrne in another way… it’s a song about a recognizably human couple.
David Byrne’s 1997 release Feelings was his best album since Rei Momo and stands as perhaps his best solo work to date.
After the more subdued David Byrne, he opened the creative floodgates on Feelings, blending his signature African and South American rhythms with synthesizers and hip-hop beats.
The result is one of his funkiest albums, and the first to my knowledge that spawned a club remix (of today’s SOTD).
Meet Me In Montauk 