Eno on Byrne

Former Talking Heads frontman's voice is 'better now than its ever been'

04 August 2008 - David Byrne and legendary musician and producer Brian Eno have collaborated for the first time since 1981, to record the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

The first single, Strange Overtones, is available from today (4 Aug) to download from the album's website for free.

The meeting

Speaking exclusively to The Beat on the BBC World Service, Brian Eno said it was a chance encounter that got the creative juices flowing again:

"I bumped into him in New York. We had dinner together and I happened to say I have a lot of music I intended to make into songs, but I never wrote the songs for them, but I really like the music, " Eno continued, "He said: 'Oh... I got quite a few lyrics.' It was about as simple as that!"

Byrne's voice

The former Roxy Music synth mastermind reckons that Byrne's voice is actually better as it is now, after nearly thirty five years in the business:

"His voice is beautiful at the moment. I think his voice is better now than its ever been, because it has a sort of tenderness as well as the slightly spikey, geeky thing that it always had in the past," he explained. 

But then it's Byrne's writing that really captures the imagination according to Eno: "But the thing that's interesting of course is what he decides to look at and write about. He doesn't see the same world as people do, he looks at the world from a different angle."

"He looks at the world from a different angle" - Brian Eno on David Byrne

Seventeen years

Its been seventeen years since the pair collaborated on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, regarded by many as a high point in the careers of both musicians and the beginning of sampling in modern pop music

The album was released in an expanded format in 2006, with Byrne and Eno allowing multitracks from two of the songs to be downloaded from their website, so fans could remix their own versions of the tunes.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is out in August and Brian Eno explained what the pair set out to do this time round:

"Without even discussing it that much, we shared a feeling about what kind of record this should be. We both wanted to make something that combines something very human and fallible and personal, with something very electronic and mathematical sometimes," he said. 

"To try to make that picture of the human still trying to survive in an increaingly complicated digital world," he continued, "It's quite easy to make just digital music and it's quite easy to make just human music, but to try and make a combination is sort of, exciting, I think."

David Byrne tour

David Byrne will tour 'David Byrne, Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno' in support of the album release, reaching the UK in March 2009.

Hear the full interview in The Beat on the BBC World Service from Thursday 7 August.


Ruth Barnes