The Heads had a good run for a group marriage, 17 years, but fairly soon it seemed as if Byrne was no longer finding more in it. If bands were all having lunch in a big art rock school canteen, Byrne would rather sit with their producer Brian Eno, ex of Roxy Music, who helped mold some of the band’s best-loved music, than at his own Talking Heads table. That impression’s now confirmed as Byrne and Eno are working together again after 27 years, while Byrne has yet to share a stage with his (terrific) old rhythm section. Call me crass, but that’s still a gig I’d like to see. After all, a flip through the many Byrne achievements confirms that surely this renaissance maverick has proven his point. Byrne and Eno clearly were the cleverclogs of their respective groups. As to Byrne and Eno’s recent musical reunion, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, the duo boldly announced that these tracks had been kicking around in a drawer for years and that David had doodled away on their lyrics and melody for even longer. There are lovely, beguiling moments and the title track is seductive. If the disc doesn’t have the spine-tingling urgency of a message from Mount Hip that once emanated from both auteurs, it has been replaced by a welcome familiarity—the feeling of an amiable ramble with old friends. Along with Patti Smith, Byrne and Eno are among the few creators we can turn to from that ’70s generation for continued artistic challenge and brain-flaming. Let’s hope that at the lofty heights of their cultural dominance, Byrne and Eno don’t stop dancing barefoot on the cutting edge. For Byrne, as is well known, that edge has often been associated with the sandy rim of a continent. In 2001, just after he’d released Look into the Eyeball, I spoke to him for Interview magazine in the West Village office that materialized his passion: Luaka Bop. His label was fantastic at unearthing and re-branding
superb but little known (often non-Anglo) artists:

Goldman: You come from Scotland, a culture that’s often associated with emotional repression. Yet you’ve always been drawn to African and Latin cultures, generally thought of as uninhibited. Has the contact changed the mix of your personality?

Byrne: Yeah. It’s the same motivation that drove me to want to sound funky in the late ’70s and ’80s. Hearing salsa and a lot of tropical music here in New York in
the clubs made me want to go further in that direction. In the old Celia Cruz songs, I heard this melancholy undercurrent in the vocal melodies, and yet the music was very danceable. So the music was providing the problem and its solution in one three-minute package, as if it were saying, “Life is sad, but the solution is dance.” I thought, That combination feels great.

I’d already seen Byrne bewitched. In the early ’90s we traveled together to the small but celebrated village of Palenque in Colombia, as part of a contingent attending the amazing old Pan-Caribbean Music Festival. A few of us disgorged from a stuffy, rattling van into a village far smaller and scruffier than I’d expected from the only surviving outpost of the descendants of Colombia’s escaped African captives, and the home of a rapidly vanishing language. Somehow I’d expected UN centers with uniformed guides. Instead our hosts here were at subsistence level.

But then the drumming began—the drums that form a living link between the quest for survival of a tribe stranded in time, and of a worldly international musician. Way pre-internet, Byrne was seeking out rarities of African music just as Picasso dug tribal masks from Benin in the 1920s. Ain’t nothing new—another young white boy transfixed and transformed by The Black Chord. Byrne was only passing through Palenque on a package trip, but you could see he was affected. It was as if, even before that blazing, dusty afternoon, those ancient beats being pounded out by people without solid footwear had propelled Byrne’s change and pointed him on a path he’d never leave. I glanced over at Byrne. In his straw porkpie hat, shades and sturdy sandals, he seemed the true American abroad. Something of an innocent perhaps, with both the virtue of openness—and the risk that blissful ignorance always carries, of causing naive havoc. But Byrne seemed benevolent enough. I smiled and Byrne grinned back and I’d never seen him so happy. His eyes had depth and a sparkle and—yes, warmth. And he was dancing. Really dancing.