DB's Song of the Day (day 179): "HOME" (2008) David Byrne and Brian Eno

The other year on the Songs of the Day post not yet represented that should be is 2008. Granted, it wasn’t that much of a year for new music, for me. Looking at the stuff I acquired that year, it’s clear I was mainly picking up on things I’d missed from previous years. But my favorite album of 2008 should be represented: Brian Eno and David Byrne’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. Isn’t the title’s absolutism enough to suck you in? If you’re in the “aging” percentile of the population, the idea that anything that’s going to happen better happen soon—“today”—is pretty compelling.

For me, the album came along as a hat-trick to two LPs I’ve already included here: Byrne’s Look into the Eyeball (2001) and Eno’s Another Day on Earth (2005). These were “late” appearances by both that showed them still cognizant of the kinds of things that attracted me to the work of both in their heydays. Joining forces on Everything was most welcome and today’s song, “Home,” is the lead-off track that set the tone for the whole. A bit nostalgic, a bit wistful, a bit hopeful, a bit melancholic, even elegiac, full of a measured sense of purpose that was tonic if, like me, you were looking down the barrel at 50 round about then. If “youth doesn’t here have end” with one’s forties, then I guess it never will.

Apparently, the collaboration occurred mostly long-distance, via email, which also adds a contemporary charm to the whole. It was around then that it became a foregone conclusion that many of us were living more involving lives online than in person. Or at least that most of our entertainment, food for thought, guilty pleasures, and major concerns had a very definite online component. Leave it to Byrne and Eno, the savants of my youth (when Eno teamed up with Talking Heads for three of their albums, and those three LPs are still lasting reference points), who collaborated on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) and showed everyone what avant-garde “rock” was all about, to come up with an album that would resonate through and through for me as a calling card from my own past. “The dimming of the light makes the picture clearer / It’s just an old photograph / There’s nothing to hide / When the world was just beginning.” That’s where we were, alright.

And with a title like “Home,” the song is gonna hit you where you live.*  Byrne, remember, was the guy who brought us, with Talking Heads, “Home is where I want to be / Lift me up and turn me round / I come home, she’s lifted up her wings / I guess that this must be the place.” Finding “the place” is what it was all about. How could you be happy or even productive in this world unless you find “the place”? And that place, once found, is home. That was back in 1983. Now it’s 25 years later and “Home – will infect whatever you do.” That’s how it is. Wherever we spent the time, at home, is now part of who we are.

Byrne, the lyricist, gives a litany of ripostes to the notion “home.” Some, “were my parents telling the truth,” take us back to home as the place we started from; others, “where my world is breaking in two,” suggest the broken home that so many have experienced. Others, like “why I keep returning,” make us aware of what a provisional thing “home” always is.

But the part of the song that always lifts my spirits—Eno’s tunes for the most part go for big gestures on this album, but then I felt that about Another Day in some ways—is the part that functions musically as the chorus, even though its lyrics change. The first time: “Heaven knows / What keeps mankind alive / Ev'ry hand / Goes searching for its part-/ ner in crime / Under chairs and behind tables / Connect-/ ing to places we have known.” That bit about “partner in crime,” which Byrne draws out over the enjambment, speaks not only of hands working together for something but of people making a home together. “Partners in crime” is one way to think of the drawing aside into an intimate world that others don’t share. That very withdrawal making that space “home.”

And maybe that’s what keeps mankind alive. The ability to—as the Gang of Four song says—“include ourselves out.” If we had to be “at large” all the time, always public (as the people who keep insisting privacy is a thing of the past would have us acknowledge), then we might really have lost any notion of home by now. Byrne even slides that into the mix with “Home – and the camera's watching.” Yes, it is, to broadcast us at home.

The second time the chorus part sounds it takes this idea to a more communal aspect than I tend to do, and so, in a way, I’m still learning from Byrne and Eno just as I did back there in my twenties.  Here the singer says he can “hear those people saying / That the eye / Is the measure of the man,” a seeing-is-believing credo that also suggests that all the stuff we look at online is what we really are. Then maybe a change in focus: “You can fly / From the stuff that still sur- / Rounds you.” Which would support my idea of home as a place of withdrawal, but then: “We’re home, and the band keeps marching on / Connect-/ ing to every living soul / Compassion for things I’ll never know.”

That’s the up side of it. The online connection to everyone everywhere that opens us up to things we’ll never know, otherwise. More even than the “global village” of television, the internet brings us into private realms, individual spaces, making communal everything we have to show for ourselves. It’s not exactly a “brave new world,” but is a brave viewed world perhaps, this Home we all share.

*(Those following this series of posts carefully will note that this is the second time a song with this title has appeared; first time was at the end of the first month of 2014, now again at the end of the sixth month.)

DB's Song of the Day (day 135): "UNDER" (2005) Brian Eno

Let us now praise Brian Eno, today’s birthday boy, 66 today. It would be easy enough to go back to those four great LPs Eno released from 1973-78, the albums that form the core of his “pop” or “rock” output, as those are the albums with lyrics and vocals and session people like Phil Manzanera, John Cale, Phil Collins, Robert Fripp, and so on. The track I would most likely pick is the lyrical and haunting “Everything Merges with the Night” from Another Green World (1975), my favorite Eno album and the one that best combines his song-writing with his trademark ambient music.

The latter genre makes up the majority of Eno albums, wonderfully spacey recordings that tend to float somewhere on the edges of one’s consciousness while they’re playing. My favorite (I’ve heard very few of the many there are) is Music for Airports (1978) and it’s as unique a piece of music as one could find. It actually sounds like your brain sounds when it’s zoning out whilst in transit. That dreamy, disconnected vibe that hums along under the surface of things. Under the airwaves.

Recently, Eno released Lux (2012) which takes me back to that earlier album and comes beautifully packaged to boot. But I’m not going to strain myself trying to describe these pieces on “the play of light,” rather, I’m taking the song that does the most for me of the four tracks that do a lot for me on Another Day on Earth (2005). I’m trying to stay out of the Seventies, you see, and it seems to me fitting to do so for those artists who have released high quality work in the 21st century. Eno’s Another Day harkens to Another Green World (in title, and in coming along 30 years after the earlier album) and so was a pleasant excursion in a form of music that only Eno can compose: the Eno song.

I should say, though, that Eno has collaborated memorably with others, and of course is a valued producer too. In 2008, he and yesterday’s birthday boy David Byrne put out Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, which was largely comprised of tunes Eno wrote and lyrics Byrne wrote. Eno, it seems, has trouble with lyrics. In his heyday—Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy (1974)—he produced some truly surrealist nursery rhymey type things. Great fun. And he has a way with a phrase and how to give a phrase weight in a song, but he definitely is a man of few words when it comes to his output of lyrics.

And yet all the songs on Another Day have some words at least. Mainly they feature the kind of aural textures for which Eno is famed together with his rather undemonstrative, meditative vocals. I like the voice on “Under” particularly, and the sweep of the song is so ripely melancholic—I feel my heart melting everytime I hear it. The drum pattern is from a real drummer, and everything else happening is pretty much Eno layering on the Eno (after all this is the guy whose credits on John Cale’s Fear are worded thus, Eno: Eno), but the way he lifts his voice on the second syllable of “un-der” is the whole thing. The song is about going under but—no—remaining instead. The theme of the album, to me, was about celebrating “another day on earth” (how many do we have left?) at the same time as one sadly acknowledges, “not nearly so many as we might like.”

It’s possible that Eno, at 59 when the album came out, was starting to face the old urges of mortality bit, and, these things being contagious, he passed the mood on to me, rightly enough. I was not yet 46 when I first heard it, but, still. The sense of lateness was in the air, if only because it was the beginning of the sense that the earth itself might not have as many days left as we imagined. But I don’t think the album is a downer. It’s elegiac in the best sense, a soundtrack for deep thinking about whatever you think matters.

The part that kills me, on that score, is the final lines: This is the way I took it through, / Just when I think I’m going under / This is the way I thought it through / This is the way I took it under.

“Going under” could be passing out, falling asleep, giving up, giving in, going down for the count, in one way or another, but then “this is the way I thought it through” is the line that floats in my psyche like a mantra. In 2005, that was manna. I was still thinking through a big project, the kind that can make you lose heart entirely when you don’t know where it might go, or might leave you. You could go under. But “the way I took it under” leads me to think of “under consideration.” Thinking through and considering. Who writes songs about such things? Eno, that’s who.

The video with the song is very nice. Great colors, nice bleeds of images. It reminds me, with the angel statue, of Wings of Desire, by Wim Wenders, and also Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Neither bad things to be reminded of in the sense of “what comes after.” Me, I’m no afterworldsman (to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase), but. Where word and sense are torn asunder / Here was the place I chose to stand / Just when I think I’m going under / I . . . remain. There’s a lot of rueful acknowledgement in those words, to me. If you’ve ever been someone’s parent, you probably have a better idea of the kind of feeling I mean. There’s a moment when you might not care to remain but, if you do, you do it because of someone else. And I say “rueful”—some might find that needing to be needed joyous—because what I hear acknowledged is the sense of having to accept “the place I chose to stand” as defining, unable to be wished away, now. A lex aeterna.

So. We’re still here. “All near the steam and summer view”—which gives me chills, heard in the right mood, the mood of wandering a city street, mostly empty in the rich twilight, and feeling the breath of being as not merely your own.

Many happy returns, Eno.