Free How Music Works by David Byrne Page B

everyday life, and that affected my thinking as I prepared for the next round of performances.
    I may well be idealizing some of what I saw and witnessed, taking aspects
    of what I perceived and adapting them to solve and deal with my own issues
    and creative bottlenecks. Somehow I have a feeling that might be okay.
    Rather than having a discreet opening act, I brought Margareth Menezes
    on board: a Brazilian singer from—surprise!—Salvador, Bahia, who would
    sing some of her own material with my band and also sing harmonies on
    my tunes. Some of her songs had Yoruba lyrics and made explicit references
    to the gods and goddesses of Candomblé, so it was all one big happy family.
    Margareth was great—too good, in fact. She stole the show on some nights.
    Live and learn.
    I bucked the tide on that tour. We did mostly new material rather than interspersing it with a lot of popular favorites, and I think I paid the price. While the shows were exciting, and even North Americans danced to our music, much of
    my audience soon abandoned me, assuming I’d “gone native.” Another lesson
    learned from performing live. At one point we got booked at a European out-
    door music festival, and my Latin band was sandwiched between Pearl Jam and
    Soundgarden. Great bands, but I couldn’t have felt more out of place.
    I followed this with a tour that mixed a band made up of funk musicians
    like George Porter, Jr. (bass player for the Meters) with some of the Latin
    musicians from Rei Momo . Now we could do some of the Talking Heads songs as well, even some that Talking Heads themselves couldn’t have played live.
    I intended to make explicit the link between Latin grooves and New Orleans
    funk, or so I hoped. I had begun to do some short acoustic sets with a drum
    machine. I’d start the show like that, alone on stage, revealing the big band upstage with a sudden curtain drop.
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    After that I decided to strip things down again. I recorded and toured with
    a four-piece band that emphasized grooves. There was a drummer, Todd Turk-
    isher, a bass player, Paul Socolow, and a percussionist, Mauro Refosco—but
    no keyboard or second guitar such as one would see or hear in a typical rock band. I had written more personal songs, which were better suited to a smaller ensemble. There was little dancing, and I seem to recall I wore black again. The last few records had been recorded before their songs had been played live, so this time I wanted to go back to where I’d started. We played small, out-of-the-way clubs (and some not so out-of-the-way) to break in the material. The idea was to hone the band into a tight live unit and then essentially record live in the studio. It worked, but only sort of. I could hear discrepancies and musical problems in the studio that I had missed in the heat and passion of live performance, so some further tweaking was still required.
    Around this time I’d discovered standards. I never lost the enjoyment I
    had in high school of playing other people’s songs in my bedroom, and gradu-
    ally, going through songbook after songbook I picked up, I was adding more
    chords and an appreciation for melody to what I knew. Willie Nelson’s Star-dust was an inspiration, as were Philadelphia soul songs, bossa novas, and songs by my favorite Brazilian and Latin singers and songwriters. But I didn’t play any of them in public. They felt delicious on the tongue, but I didn’t get them all right. I didn’t grow up on those songs, but I began to feel an appreciation for a beautiful melody and harmonies—harmonies in the chord voicings
    and not just in what a second singer might sing. Beauty was a revelation, and these songs were unashamed to be beautiful, which was a difficult thing to
    accept in the world of downtown musicians and artists. Anything that sounds
    or looks beautiful would seem to that crowd to be merely pretty, shallow, and therefore deeply suspect—morally suspect even, I found