How Music Works

by David Byrne

  Inspired by these records, Brian, Jon, and I fantasized about making a series of recordings based on an imaginary culture. (Unbeknownst to us, at that moment in Germany, Holger Czukay and his fellow band members in Can, who were students of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, were beginning their own “Ethnic Forgeries” series.) For a brief minute, we had the idea that we might be able to create our own “field recordings”—a musical documentation of an imaginary culture. It would be sort of like a Borges or Calvino story, but this would be a mystery in musical form. It appealed to us, I suspect, partly because it would make us more or less invisible as creators. In our vision, we’d release a record with typically detailed liner notes explaining the way music functioned in that culture and how it was produced there—the kind of academic notes common on such records. One might think the sort of dark and wiggly sounds we were known for would not be credible as music that had been found and recorded in some far-off cultural oasis, evidence of a kind of lost world where some branch of the pop-music tree had become isolated from the rest of the world. But then you come across a real group like Kongotronics, a group of Congolese musicians who play amplified mbiras (thumb pianos) that they construct by wrapping wires around a magnetic loadstone, plopping those inside the instruments, and then feeding the wires into a guitar amp, greatly distorted. I once heard one of the best lead-guitar players ever on a cassette that seemed to come from Sudan. The eddies and backwaters of pop music do indeed produce some magical, unexpected meetings so our imaginary group that played cardboard boxes for percussion and Arabic solos on mini-moogs is not inconceivable.

  Photo by Hugh Brown

  Needless to say, that whole plan was abandoned, but some of the inspiration behind it lingered. We decided to use our usual instruments in new ways, and whatever materials happened to be lying about would be used for sound production. We’d try to pretend that we didn’t necessarily already know how a guitar or piano was meant to be played, and we would reject some approaches if they seemed too informed by our own past experience. On the record we ended up making, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, we sometimes used guitar cases or the above-mentioned cardboard boxes for drums, and pots and pans for percussion. This might have all been a bit silly, but it did serve to shake us out of tried-and-true patterns.

  Eno had already begun work on some recordings that incorporated found voices, and he brought these to the table. One of these led to the song “Mea Culpa,” which had a foundation consisting of layers of vocal loops of radio call-in-show voices hemming and hawing. We both soon realized that the “found vocal” idea might serve as the thread and theme that would pull the new record together.

  I suspect that this idea appealed to us partly because it eliminated any conflict or likelihood of competition between the two of us as singers: neither of us would sing on the record. (This fact proved to be an issue for some folks down the line—how could it be “our” record if we weren’t singing on it?) Relying exclusively on found vocals also solved a content problem: the lyrics would clearly not be derived from autobiographical or confessional material. Often, what the vocalists were actually saying didn’t matter to us at all. It was the sound of their vocals—the passion, rhythm, and phrasing—that conveyed the emotional content. This approach retained some of the “authorless” aspect that had appealed to us when we came up with the fake field-recording concept, but it also turned out to be contentious to those who view songs primarily as vehicles for texts.

  Using found elements in creative works certainly wasn’t a new idea. Duchamp had nominated stuff from the hardware store as fine art, Kurt Schwitters had made collages out of labels and packages, and Warhol had made “paintings” out of photos clipped from the tabloid press. In the plastic arts, this idea was, if not commonplace, at least acceptable. Bern Porter, James Joyce, JG Ballard, and the collage books of Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore lifted passages from type and advertising copy and repurposed them. John Cage and others had made sonic collages out of multiple records playing simultaneously or multiple radios tuned to different stations, but in pop music the idea was limited to novelty records (The Flying Saucer and Mr. Jaws) or selfconscious avant-garde experiments like the Beatles’s “Revolution 9.”

  While we were in LA, Eno and I hung out a bit with Toni Basil, whom we both admired. Her appearances on Soul Train with the dance group the Lockers were unforgettable, and the group she was working with and organizing at that time, the Electric Boogaloos,E were creating some of the most amazing and innovative dance we’d ever seen. Their moves put the arty dance world to shame. They were funky and robotic at the same time, a combination that somehow seemed apt. Either the machines had gotten funky, or the funk had been infected by a robot virus; whatever it was, it felt right. Eno described the way the Boogaloos moved as “somadelic”—something that made your body go all wobbly the way LSD did your head.

  Electric Boogaloos, courtesy of Vicki Stavrinos

  Toni had an offer to do a TV special featuring these dancers, and for a short while we imagined that My Life in the Bush of Ghosts would end up as the score or soundtrack. Our ever-morphing guiding principal had changed from an audio document of an imaginary culture to beats and sounds for funky urban dancers for a Hollywood TV show! That project fell through, but like the imaginary-civilization idea, it became another subtext for our recordings, because it allowed us to imagine that we were making a dance record. Of course, the influence of music on dancers is a recurring theme in this book, and we hoped our project could be a new kind of psychedelic dance music that might, at a stretch, get played in dance clubs, which would have been hugely validating for us. Years later, I was predictably excited when I heard DJ Larry Levan play something off our record at the Paradise Garage, a huge dance club in New York.

  This was the very early eighties, and some of the most innovative mixing and arranging in pop music was happening in the dance-music world. The rock scene was becoming increasingly conservative and entrenched, despite all the shouting about freedom, individuality, and self-expression. The influence of dub and what were then called “extended mixes” of songs in the dance-club world were just gaining momentum. The fact that DJs and remixers were using other people’s tracks as raw material resonated with our use of found vocals and the way we arranged songs by switching tracks on and off. We were turning the mixing board into a giant instrument. This arranging and composing technique soon became extremely common in hip-hop. No credit to us—it was simply in the air at that time.

  Neither Eno nor I saw ourselves as virtuoso musicians, but we aimed to turn our limitations into advantages. We used those cardboard boxes as kick drums, biscuit tins as snare drums, and bass guitars as rhythm instruments. This had the advantage of making everything sound a little “off.” A kick drum made out of a guitar case did the job. It made a nice thud in the low range, but it also sounded slightly unfamiliar and fresh. We’d generally play each part that would eventually constitute the bed of the piece over and over, as if we were a human loop. Digital loops and sampling didn’t exist yet, but by playing the same part over and over, one could create a rhythmic and hypnotic textural bed that could be manipulated and layered over later. There were wonderful real players involved, too—drummers and bass players were the foundation on some tracks, but by and large it was a DIY affair.

  Without samplers, we had to place the found vocals into our music by trial and error. We’d have two tape machines playing simultaneously, one containing our music track and the other the vocal, and if the gods willed, which they often did, there would be serendipity. The resulting “vocal” over our track would feel like the parts had always belonged together, and we’d have a “take.” The tape recorders were all “played” manually, and getting the voices to sync with the music tracks in a way that seemed like what a singer would do was very seat-of-the-pants—there was none of the incremental tweaking and time-correcting of tracks that’s possible with modern samplers and recording software, so throwing the vocal
s against the music entailed a kind of performance. We would start and stop the “singer” (which was now the tape with the vocal on it) as if he or she were responding to our music, coming in with a particularly emotional line as the track modulated up to a new key, for example. These “performances” were witnessed only by us and one or two others, but as we’d fly those vocals in, there was a vibrant energy present, as if we were actually singing ourselves.

  Sometimes, at night, back in our apartments, we’d record radio sermons on the cassette recorders of our late-seventies boomboxes. The quality of these recordings was sometimes dubious (on “Come With Us” we had to make the background hiss that was due to intermittent radio reception part of the dark ambience of the song), but overall we came to realize that these vocals recorded on cassettes sounded fine—or at least good enough (there’s that phrase again). High-fidelity, we realized, was a vastly overrated convention that no one had bothered to question. Sometimes the harsh megaphone-like quality of these vocals actually had much more character than a “good” recording. One was subliminally aware that these vocals were “secondhand” or disembodied, and this quality made them feel like transmissions from a desperate planet—ours. At times, the vocals we used came from the records we’d been passing around for the past year. Arabic pop records, field recordings, ethnographic recordings, gospel records—all were being scoured for possible vocal “samples” now that we realized this would be the unifying aspect of this record.

  The amazing thing was how easy it was (well, relatively), and how much the vocals felt like they had been performed or “sung” with the “band.” Part of this effect was, of course, entirely in the ear of the beholder—a phenomenon we noticed early on. The mind tends to find congruencies and links where none previously existed—not just in music, but in everything. More than just a way of tricking the mind, we also felt that, when successful, this effect also “tricked” the emotions. Some of the tracks generated genuine (to us) emotional reactions. It felt like the “singer” really was responding to the music we had made, and vice versa, in a way that often elicited powerful feelings— uplift, ecstasy, dread, or sexy playfulness. Perhaps it’s wrong to say the emotions were being “tricked”; maybe these passionate voices and rhythms triggered emotional responses because our brains have neurological “receptors” awaiting musical and vocal combinations just like these, and we provided the necessary materials for that process to take place. Maybe that’s what artists do. A big major chord is a “trick” too.

  We gravitated toward passionate “vocalists,” and this made it seem to us that the natural cadences and metric of any impassioned vocal—even ones spoken, not sung—might be in some way innately and intrinsically musical. It’s easy to hear this musical speech in the sermon of a gospel preacher where the line between singing and speaking is intentionally fuzzy, but it’s there in talk show hosts, political speeches and, well, maybe in all our vocalizations. Maybe the difference between speech and music isn’t all that great. We infer a lot from the tone of someone’s voice, so imagine that aspect of speech pushed just a little further. The weird cadences of a Valley girl, for instance, might be viewed as a species of singing. The malls of Sherman Oaks are a setting for a kind of massed choir.

  Some people find all this disturbing. In the West, the presumption of a causal link between the author and performer is strong. For instance, it’s assumed that I write lyrics (and the accompanying music) for songs because I have something I need to express. And it’s assumed that everything one utters or sings (or even plays) emerges from some autobiographical impulse. Even if I choose to sing someone else’s song, it’s assumed that the song was, when it was written, autobiographical for them, and I am both acknowledging that fact and at the same time implying that it’s applicable to my own biography. Nonsense! It doesn’t matter whether or not something actually happened to the writer—or to the person interpreting the song. On the contrary, it is the music and the lyrics that trigger the emotions within us, rather than the other way around. We don’t make music—it makes us. Which is maybe the point of this whole book.

  Granted, a writer has to draw on some instinctual understanding of a feeling in order to put something with some emotional truth down on paper, but it didn’t necessarily have to happen to them. In writing and performing music we are pushing our own buttons, and the surprising thing about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is that vocals that we didn’t write ourselves, or, in the case of the found vocals, didn’t even sing, could still make us feel such a gamut of emotions.

  Making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge up emotions in performer and listener alike. Some people find this idea repulsive, because it seems to relegate the artist to the level of trickster, manipulator, and deceiver—a kind of self-justifying onanist. They would prefer to see music as an expression of emotion rather than a generator of it, to believe in the artist as someone with something to say. I’m beginning to think of the artist as someone who is adept at making devices that tap into our shared psychological make-up and that trigger the deeply moving parts we have in common. In that sense, the conventional idea of authorship is questionable. Not that I don’t want credit for the songs I’ve written, but what constitutes authorship is maybe not what we would like it to be. This queasiness about rethinking how music works is also connected with the idea of authenticity. The idea that musicians who appear to be “down-home,” or seem to be conveying aspects of their own experience, must therefore be more “real.” It can be disillusioning to find out that the archetypical rock-and-roll persona is an act, and that none of the “country” folk in Nashville really wear cowboy hats (well, except during their public appearances and photo shoots).

  This issue was resolved years later by electronic and hip-hop artists, whose music was often either rarely played by them (in the case of hip-hop artists) or who, like Eno and I on this record, remained more or less faceless. Electronic and lounge artists like NASA, Thievery Corporation, David Guetta and Swedish House Mafia often use a variety of friends and namebrand singers on their tracks and almost never sing on their own records. Now it has become accepted that the author can be the curator, the guiding sensibility, rather than the singer.

  After finishing an initial version of Bush of Ghosts in 1980, we set about the task of “clearing”—getting permission to use—the found vocals. This is a common practice nowadays, and there are established companies who do nothing but clear samples, but back then, no one that we approached for the rights to their recordings had any idea what the hell we were up to. The record sat on the shelf ready to go while the phone calls and faxes went back and forth. Most of the vocals we hoped to use were cleared, but in a couple of cases we were denied rights and were forced to find alternatives. Sometimes this resulted in newer, better tracks, and sometimes not. In the meantime, we had returned to New York and begun work on the next Talking Heads record, which would become Remain in Light.

  MODULAR MUSIC (REMAIN IN LIGHT)

  Eno and I were full of enthusiasm after everything we’d learned and experienced making Bush of Ghosts, and we felt confident that a Talking Heads sort of pop record could be made using some of the same recording and composing techniques. The rest of the band agreed that starting with a blank slate would be a creative and revolutionary way to make our next record. We didn’t intend to use the found voices or cardboard drums this time, but the process of creating repetitive tracks and then making sections by switching instruments on and off using the mixing board was retained.

  We gave ourselves two weeks to build this instrumental scaffolding, but we knew we wouldn’t finish the record—the vocals would have to come later. In a nod to a strange ritual of the era, we recorded these initial tracks at a studio in the Bahamas. Maybe a decade earlier, the idea had taken hold that making pop records should be like sequestering oneself to write the Great American Novel. Studios were built in idyllic locations—Sausalito, deep in the Rocky Mountains, in a barn in Woodstock,
New York, a French château, St. Martins, Miami Beach, or Nassau—with the idea that a self-contained musical act would hole up there, avoid distractions, and emerge with a polished finished product. There were often beaches nearby, and sometimes meals were communal and catered. (The financial climate for the music business was obviously different then.) Isolation and time to focus has a lot to recommend it, but many bands (my own included) found ways to achieve those things through much less expensive means.

  We worked rapidly. One or two people would lay down a track, usually some kind of repetitive groove that would last about four minutes, the presumed length of a song. Maybe it would be a guitar riff and a drum part, or maybe a sequenced arpeggio pattern and an intermittent guitar squeal. Others would then respond to what had been put down, adding their own repetitive parts, filling in the gaps and spaces, for the whole length of the “song.” As we’d listen to one part being recorded, we’d all be scheming about what we could add—it was a kind of game. This manner of recording had the added advantage that we weren’t trying to replicate the sound of the live band. We hadn’t gotten attached to the way these songs and their instruments and arrangements sounded in performance, so in some ways the conflicts we had confronted when we’d first entered a recording studio years previously were bypassed.

  After the tracks began to fill up, or when the sound of them playing simultaneously was sufficiently dense, it was time to make sections. While the groove usually remained constant, different combinations of instruments would be switched on and off simultaneously at different given times. One group of instruments that produced a certain texture and groove might eventually be nominated as a “verse” section, and another group—often larger-sounding— would be nominated as the “chorus.” Often in these songs there was no real key change. The bass line tended to remain constant, but one could still imply key modulations, illusory chord changes, which were very useful for building excitement while maintaining the trance-like feeling of constant root notes. Up to this point, there was still no top-line melody, nothing that the singer (me) would put words to. That came later.