After Talking Heads
released their fourth album and masterpiece, Remain in Light, the band
went on hiatus while its members explored side projects. Guitarist Jerry
Harrison released The Red and the Black, an underrated solo album which
built on his work with The Modern Lovers and Talking Heads. Rhythm section and
married couple, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, formed Tom Tom Club with Tina’s
sisters and members of the Remain in Light touring band. Tom Tom Club’s
debut functions like a release valve for the pressures building on Remain in
Light and endures as a funky, energetic party album. Lead singer David Byrne
and Brian Eno, producer of three Talking Heads albums, set off to create an
album that draws upon similar archetypes as Remain in Light, but stands
apart from anything these considerable talents have created before or since. My
Life in the Bush of Ghosts sounds like Byrne and Eno discovered a way to
tune into the radio signal of this entire planet and distill it into 40 minutes
of genre-blurring, hypnotically engaging, and beautifully layered music.
Three and a half decades
after its release, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts remains a
ground-breaking and brilliant tangent from the minds of two of the most
idiosyncratic and cerebral artists in popular music. Whereas Tom Tom Club
seized upon the incredible pool of talent that had formed around Talking Heads
and aimed it in a loose, upbeat, and fun-loving direction, Eno and Byrne set
out on a concentrated, enigmatic, and exploratory mission into the unknown. My
Life in the Bush of Ghosts contains some of the same DNA of poly-rhythms,
experimentalism, and pastiche as Remain in Light, but this album grows
into its environment without the frames and guidance of Byrne’s observational
characters or recognizable song structures. Although both Eno and Byrne were
known at this point for their skills and abilities as lead singers and
songwriters, it may come as a surprise to some that this album features neither
their voices nor their lyrics. The album’s liner notes credit both Brian Eno
and David Byrne with, “guitars, basses, synthesizers, drums, percussions, found
objects.” In place of Eno and Byrne’s vocals, nine of the eleven songs on the
album contain elements cited in the liner notes as “voices” and include samples
of radio hosts and callers, preachers, an exorcist, and singers from Egypt,
coastal islands near the state of Georgia, and Lebanon. Among the eleven
musicians who worked with Eno and Byrne on this album, eight are percussionists
and three play bass. Eno and Byrne combine this robust rhythmic engine with the
found, fragmented vocals to create a set of self-contained, evocative snapshots
that, when regarded as a whole, reflect back to the listener like a mosaic
formed from the pieces of a broken mirror.
Eno and Byrne reunited
in 2008 for Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, an album that
serves as a high point for both artists’ output in the last twenty years but
bears no discernible connection to their first collaborative album. Everything
That Happens Will Happen Today features some of Eno’s best recent
production work as well as some of Byrne’s most natural vocals and most
compelling lyrics since Talking Heads, but feels strangely orthodox and prosaic
compared to the radical poetry contained within their first joint musical
endeavor. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts merges elements of art rock,
experimental music, funk, electronic music, African pop, folk music, field
recordings, and minimalism into a highly influential sum, but few of its
successors can compare with this fascinating musical exploration.
John Parsell
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