by David Byrne
I already had a structure, too—guitar chords that had been inspired by a combination of the American standards and Brazilian songs I’d been learning from songbooks. They didn’t sound much like rock chords. I also had a melody, but only a few words. The lyric fragments I had come up with were about a girl who spent all her time in nightclubs and discos, never really connecting with what most of us call daily life. Some called her a bad girl, but the lyrics defended her, saying there was nothing wrong with innocent sensual pleasure. Some of the lyrics reminded me of Neil Young, at least the way they fit with the melody, though I doubt anyone else noticed that. The piece had shape but was unfinished when I sent it to Veloso.
He bounced back with additional lyrics in Portuguese, but they were about Carmen Miranda. Outside of Brazil, most people think of her as the Brazilian with fruit on her head who went Hollywood. But Miranda was actually Portuguese, not Brazilian, so now we had a little Lisbon (or at least Portugal) connection after all. After Miranda’s appearances in so many campy Hollywood movies, some people began to disparage her—she had previously been a respected and popular singer in Brazil. Her Hollywood manifestation was, for them, both something to be proud of and also somewhat dubious and confusing. Furthermore, her stage attire and even the big headdresses alluded to Afro-Brazilian culture—they mimicked, in a way that Brazilians would appreciate, the women of Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion—so she represented more than just samba. There was some deeply profound shit secreted in those headdresses, and Veloso alluded to it obliquely in his lyrics. So we had my words talking about one girl and his referencing another, and they kind of worked together, juxtaposed. I rarely manage to collaborate on lyrics—I tend to mark my boundary as being between words and music, but maybe because we were also intercutting languages, it seemed natural.
STARTING WITH WORDS — OTHER PEOPLE’S WORDS
In 2005, I began working on a disco-musical project for the theater, collaborating with Norman Cook, aka DJ Fatboy Slim, about former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos. Since it was based on a historical figure, I tried something I hadn’t done in a very long time: I began the writing process with the words. While I was researching the characters and the period, I highlighted noteworthy and memorable passages and then assembled files of anecdotes, quotes from speeches, interviews, and conversations. I began to group these materials into potential episodes and plot points, which would ultimately link up to tell a story. The characters—all real people—and the story had precedence in this project, and each episode and its song had to convey something specific, so prioritizing the text made sense.
To begin writing a song, I would lay out all my notes on each scene—the quotes and oral testimony of Imelda Marcos and her family, for example— and simply try singing them, sometimes over chords I played simultaneously on guitar and sometimes over Cook’s grooves. In my notes I’d kept track of the many peculiar, emotionally loaded, alliterative, repetitious, and original phrases that Imelda, her husband Ferdinand, and others were supposed to have said. For a songwriter, these things were a godsend. They were halfway to being lyrics already! I couldn’t have made them up, and of course they always perfectly encapsulated what the people were thinking and feeling—or at least what they wanted the world to believe that they were thinking and feeling. Reading that Imelda had said she wanted the words HERE LIES LOVE inscribed on her tombstone was like being handed the title of the musical on a platter. Not only did it epitomize the fact that she often viewed herself as having unselfishly offered love and sacrificed herself for the Philippine people, but it gave me an opportunity to have her reflect on her life and accomplishments, along with some subtle ripostes she would throw at her detractors.
Other people have used such “found texts” as well. For example, Peter Sellars used congressional testimony as source material for the libretto of John Adams’s opera about Robert Oppenheimer and the bomb, Doctor Atomic. Using these texts as source material for lyrics seemed to absolve me (at least in my own mind) of some responsibility for what the characters were saying, or singing, in this piece. I could use a lyric that was, for example, way more sentimental or corny than anything I would ever have allowed myself to write, and it was okay because it was the character saying it, not me. In the song “Here Lies Love,” Imelda sings, “The most important things are love and beauty,” which is a quote from a speech she made. If I sang those lyrics, people would assume I was being ironic, but to have them come out of her character’s mouth rings true. I found that the same thing applied musically: there were musical references—disco beats or, to my ears, a Kenny Rogers reference—and other genre quotations that were okay to include because they were what a character would have used as a vehicle for their feelings, if one imagined them being able to express themselves in song. Who wouldn’t want to be able to “put on” the voice of Sharon Jones to express the jaw-dropping decadence, sense of fun, and abandon of first visiting a major dance club? Lastly, to me the words just seemed truer knowing that they were what someone had actually said—that I didn’t put words in their mouths.
Was this process of lyric writing a sort of collaboration with the past? Although I reordered most of these found phrases, repeated some, and bent others to help them fit meter and rhyme, I tried to make my own writing embody the intentions of my invisible “collaborators.”
Here Lies Love is a collaboration that is—like the score I did with Twyla Tharp, and like the film music I’ve done over the years—a collaboration not so much with another musician, but rather with the theatrical form itself (not to diminish Norm’s contribution one bit). It is the stage production, not a person, that needs my music to accomplish specific dramatic, emotional, or rhythmic ends. There are exigencies and constraints in this kind of collaboration that make it very different from working alone or with another musician.
I don’t know if stage, TV, and film composers think of themselves as collaborating with the directors, the medium, or the writers, but sometimes music and visuals work together so seamlessly that it’s hard to imagine a theatrical work or a film without its score, and vice versa. Some film and stage music evokes the whole story, the characters, and the visuals every time one hears them. The constraints in these kinds of collaborations are not the tastes and proclivities of the other musician or songwriter, but the needs of the larger piece and its characters.
A book called People Power: The Philippine Revolution of 1986, An Eyewitness History, about the four days of the People Power Revolution, was hugely helpful to me while I was working on Here Lies Love. It included not only testimony from generals, priests, and public figures, but the moving words of ordinary individuals—the real meat and potatoes of that movement. As in Tahrir Square, it was the presence of ordinary folks, manifesting daily, thousands and thousands of them, that tipped the scales in the Philippines. Their words allowed me to view events through their eyes, the mundane mixed with the sublime, and they made it come alive for me. Having visited Manila, I could picture the neighborhoods, the houses and streets these people described, the way their daily lives intersected with historical events. People tended to mention very specific details that swirled around and were folded into the onward rush of history. Joggers out for a morning run as tanks appeared on the streets. Going out for coffee to find hundreds of thousands gathered around the corner from your home.
Coincidentally, at this time I was also reading a book by Rebecca Solnit called A Paradise Built in Hell, about the almost utopian social transformations that sometimes emerge out of disasters and revolutions—citizens spontaneously and selflessly helping one another after traumatic events such as the San Francisco and Mexico earthquakes, the London blitz, and the 9/11 attacks. All these events have in common a magical and all too brief moment when class and other social differences vanish, and a common humanity becomes evident. These moments often last only a few days, but they have a profound and lasting impact on the participants, who witness a door cracked open a little to reveal
a better world, one whose existence they never forget.
The Filipino People Power Revolution looked to me like one of those moments, and I hoped that a tiny bit of that feeling could be captured in songs and scenes. A theatrical piece that had previously struck me as a tragedy might also have a kind of happy and even inspirational ending, not simply by describing the overthrow of one dictator and his wife, but because the humanity of a people might allow itself to be revealed.
I’m not sure Here Lies Love will be a successful theater piece—creatively or commercially—but being able to write songs in which I function as the conduit for the feelings and thoughts of others was hugely liberating and, well, easier than I thought. It’s writing to order, but without too much vagueness in the intention, as the sources—the people—are as real as what happened.
EMERGENT STORYTELLING
Writing words to fit an existing melody and meter, as I did on Everything That Happens and many other records, is something anyone who writes in rhyme does naturally and intuitively—every rapper improvises or composes to a meter, for example. I had been encouraged to make this process, which is usually internalized, more explicit when I was writing the words for Remain in Light. That was the first time I tackled a whole record of lyrics this way. I found that, remarkably, solving the puzzle of making words and phrases fit existing structures often resulted, somewhat surprisingly, in words that have an emotional consistency and sometimes even a narrative thread, even though those aspects of the texts weren’t planned ahead of time.
How does this happen? With Remain in Light and even before that, I would look for words that fit preexisting melodic fragments that I or others had come up with. After filling lots of pages with non-sequitors, I would scan them to see if a lyrically resonant group emerged. Phrases that would hint at the beginning of an actual subject often seemed to want to emerge. This might seem magical—claiming that a text “wants” to come into being (and we’ve heard this said before), but it’s true. When some phrases, even if collected almost at random, begin to resonate together and appear to be talking about the same thing, it’s tempting to claim they have a life of their own. The lyrics may have begun as gibberish, but often, though not always, a “story” in the broadest sense emerges. Emergent storytelling, one might say.
But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music—they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about what the words say, literally, and nothing more. If done poorly, they can destroy the pleasant ambiguity that constitutes much of the reason we love music. That ambiguity allows listeners to psychologically tailor a song to suit their needs, sensibilities, and situations, but words can limit that, too. There are plenty of beautiful pieces of music that I can’t listen to because they’ve been “ruined” by bad words—my own and others. In Beyoncé’s song “Irreplaceable,” she rhymes “minute” with “minute,” and I cringe every time I hear it (partly because by that point I’m singing along). On my own song “Astronaut,” I wrap up with the line “feel like I’m an astronaut,” which seems like the dumbest metaphor for alienation ever. Ugh.
So I begin by improvising a melody over the music. I do this by singing nonsense syllables, but with weirdly inappropriate passion, given that I’m not saying anything. Once I have a wordless melody and a vocal arrangement that my collaborators (if there are any) and I like, I’ll begin to transcribe that gibberish as if it were real words.
I’ll listen carefully to the meaningless vowels and consonants on the recording, and I’ll try to understand what that guy (me), emoting so forcefully but inscrutibly, is actually saying. It’s like a forensic exercise. I’ll follow the sound of the nonsense syllables as closely as possible. If a melodic phrase of gibberish ends on a high ooh sound, then I’ll transcribe that, and in selecting actual words, I’ll try to choose one that ends in that syllable, or as close to it as I can get. So the transcription process often ends with a page of real words, still fairly random, that sound just like the gibberish.
I do that because the difference between an ohh and an aah, and a “b” and a “th” sound is, I assume, integral to the emotion that the story wants to express. I want to stay true to that unconscious, inarticulate intention. Admittedly that content has no narrative, or might make no literal sense yet, but it’s in there—I can hear it. I can feel it. My job at this stage is to find words that acknowledge and adhere to the sonic and emotional qualities rather than to ignore and possibly destroy them.
Part of what makes words work in a song is how they sound to the ear and feel on the tongue. If they feel right physiologically, if the tongue of the singer and the mirror neurons of the listener resonate with the delicious appropriateness of the words coming out, then that will inevitably trump literal sense, although literal sense doesn’t hurt. If recent neurological hypotheses regarding mirror neurons are correct, then one could say that we empathetically “sing”—with both our minds and the neurons that trigger our vocal and diaphragm muscles—when we hear and see someone else singing. In this sense, watching a performance and listening to music is always a participatory activity. The act of putting words down on paper is certainly part of songwriting, but the proof is in seeing how it feels when it’s sung. If the sound is untrue, the listener can tell.
I try not to pre-judge anything that occurs to me at this point in the writing process—I never know if something that sounds stupid at first will in some soon-to-emerge lyrical context make the whole thing shine. So no matter how many pages get filled up, I try to turn off the internal censor.D
Sometimes sitting at a desk trying to force this doesn’t work. I never have writer’s block, exactly, but sometimes things do slow down. At those times I ask myself if my conscious mind might be thinking too much—and it is exactly at this point that I most want and need surprises and weirdness from the depths. Some techniques help in that regard. For instance, I’ll carry a micro-recorder and go jogging on the West Side, recording phrases that match the song’s meter as they occur to me. On the rare occasion that I’m driving a car, I can do the same thing (are there laws against driving and songwriting?). Basically, anything—driving, jogging, swimming, cooking, cycling—that occupies part of the conscious mind and distracts it, works.
The idea is to allow the chthonic material the freedom it needs to gurgle up. To distract the gatekeepers. Sometimes just a verse, or even a phrase or two, will resonate and be sufficient, and that’s enough to “unlock” the whole thing. From there on, it becomes more like fill-in-the-blank, conventional puzzle solving.
This particular writing process could also be viewed as a collaboration: a collaboration with oneself, with one’s subconscious as well as with the collective unconscious, as Jung would put it. As in dreams, it often seems as if a hidden part of oneself, a doppelgänger, is attempting to communicate, to impart some important information. When we write, we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters, different parts of our brains and hearts. And then, when they’ve each had their say, we mentally switch hats, step back from accessing our myriad selves, and take a more distanced and critical view of what we’ve done. Don’t we always work by editing and structuring the outpouring of our many selves? Isn’t the end product the result of two or more sides of ourselves working with one another? We’ve often heard this process described by creative folks as “channeling,” or just as often people refer to themselves as a conduit for some force that speaks through them. I suspect that the outside entity—the god, the alien, the source—is a part of oneself, and that this kind of creation is about learning how to listen to and collaborate with it.
Courtesy of David Byrne
CHAPTER SEVEN
Business and Finances
Distribution & Survival Options for Musical Artists
After the studio work is finished, after the record has been mixed and pressed, how does a song or album get from the composer or the performer to the listener?
How important is that? How important is getting one�
�s work out to the public? Should that even really matter to a creative artist? Would I make music if no one were listening? If I were a hermit and lived on a mountaintop like a bearded guy in a cartoon, would I take the time to write a song? Many visual artists whose work I love—like Henry Darger, Gordon Carver, and James Castle—never shared their art. They worked ceaselessly and hoarded their creations, which were discovered only after they died or moved out of their apartments. Could I do that? Why would I? Don’t we want some validation, respect, feedback? Come to think of it, I might do it—in fact, I did, when I was in high school puttering around with those tape loops and splicing. I think those experiments were witnessed by exactly one friend. However, even an audience of one is not zero.
Still, making music is its own reward. It feels good and can be a therapeutic outlet; maybe that’s why so many people work hard in music for no money or public recognition at all. In Ireland and elsewhere, amateurs play well-known songs in pubs, and their ambition doesn’t stretch beyond the door. They are getting recognition (or humiliation) within their village, though. In North America, families used to gather around the piano in the parlor. Any monetary remuneration that might have accrued from these “concerts” was secondary. To be honest, even tooling around with tapes in high school, I think I imagined that someone, somehow, might hear my music one day. Maybe not those particular experiments, but I imagined that they might be the baby steps that would allow my more mature expressions to come into being and eventually reach others. Could I have unconsciously had such a long-range plan? I have continued to make plenty of music, often with no clear goal in sight, but I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I believe that the aimless wandering down a meandering path will surely lead to some (well-deserved, in my mind) reward down the road. There’s a kind of unjustified faith involved here.