Brown Eyes and Eno Were Tired…

Post Author:

…At least, that's what I imagine Brian Eno is saying about how he and collaborator David Byrne must have felt, having walked and having scrambled through the moors and through the briars of their latest foray into pop music.

Though brown-eyed former Talking Head Byrne's hair is white as teeth, he alone is foraying out to shoot ions into the touring ether in support of his most recent collaboration with balding behind-the-scenes stealer Eno, their first since 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The two spent a leisurely couple of years since 2006, following Nonesuch's reissue of Ghosts, quietly putting the fruit of their collective efforts back on the musical vine. Obviously, in this duo consisting of a man who once dressed as a peacock for the Roxy Music liner notes to “For Your Pleasure,” and a man who once publicly professed in the Talking Heads Film True Stories that “the thing he likes most is forgetting,” we have here a couple of guys with very good taste and quite fortified memories.

Titled Everything that Happens Will Happen Today, it is, as Byrne puts it on his website, “a record of sung songs, and the result really surprises me.”

Well, surprising or no, Byrne will be on the road with his band in September singing Talking Heads songs he collaborated with Eno on as well as material that is the result of this most recent work — again, without Brian Eno, or, as this interview with him in the September 12, 1974 issue of Rolling Stone calls him, “The Refreshing Experience.” Oh, what a burden to be so relied on. Really, Brian Eno, why aren't you going out on tour for this one? America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.

The album will be available as a digital download, a stream, and an antediluvian piece of media on August 18. Sign up at everythingthathappens.com to get “Strange Overtones” free next Monday (8/4), along with tour updates.