I'm counting all the possibilities

April 6, 2018 11:01 PM

My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts... is not the subject of this post. That was the first Eno/Byrne-Byrne/Eno collaboration, way back in 1981. David Byrne and Brian Eno collaborated a second time [YT album, ~48m], in 2008, with the MEA [Most Excellent Album] Everything That Happens Will Happen Today [shockingly extensive Wikipedia link]: Side A: Home, My Big Nurse, I Feel My Stuff, Everything That Happens, Life Is Long, The River

Side B: Strange Overtures, Wanted For Life, One Fine Day, Poor Boy, The Lighthouse

posted by hippybear (13 comments total)

I'm going to recommend "I Feel My Stuff" as the go-to track if you need to be convinced that this album is worth attention. That track intrigues me in ways that I could like a zillion parallels to here but won't.
posted by hippybear at 11:02 PM on April 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

obligatory "holy crap, that was 10 years ago?" comment
posted by thelonius at 11:06 PM on April 6, 2018

Fripp should have been a part of this.
posted by rhizome at 11:14 PM on April 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

If anyone knows how I can enhance that Wikipedia article, please let me know. Thanks.
posted by koavf at 12:10 AM on April 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

I Feel My Stuff

this nugget just popped up today in my mp3 shuffle. really quite good.
posted by philip-random at 12:15 AM on April 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

Excellent album.
posted by eustacescrubb at 7:17 AM on April 7, 2018

I admire "Life in the Bush", but I love "Everything that happens". It was supposed to be an album of "secular gospel" and it is filled with optimism based on no real evidence of good (just like real gospel music!).

The current Byrne/Eno album "American Utopia" is also pretty good (if uneven). It is very cheerful, even though a close examination of the lyrics finds lots of ambiguity. "Now the chicken imagines a heaven, Full of roosters and plenty of corn, And God is a very old rooster, And eggs are like Jesus, his son".
posted by acrasis at 8:40 AM on April 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

I dig the new Byrne album. His songwriting has always been weird - one of the things that makes a song like "Mind" possible is that he's willing to record a song like "Electric Guitar."
posted by eustacescrubb at 9:52 AM on April 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

I like this album! (I like most David Byrne stuff to some degree.)

Ride, Rise, Roar is a documentary of the tour that Byrne did with the songs from this one as well as other Eno-affiliated Talking Heads songs. It was a fun show -- they had a small troupe of dancers on stage as well as the band.
posted by oakroom at 10:53 AM on April 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

I saw that tour. It was astounding, much more than just a music concert. I love that movie, because it's the only document I have for that show.
posted by hippybear at 10:57 AM on April 7, 2018

This album has grown on me, but Bush of Ghosts was a lightning bolt that blew open my musical horizons. "Help Me Somebody" is still as vibrant and propulsive as the first time I heard it in the 80s.

/derail sorry not sorry

posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:21 PM on April 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

I have a really distinct memory of listening to this album in a cheap motel across from the street from the Amtrak station in Flagstaff, AZ -- pretty sure it was this Rodeway Inn -- at the tail end of a bad vacation. I'd been working my ass off and hadn't taken a vacation in literally years, and a friend of mine and I decided to go to White Sox Spring Training, and I took a couple of extra days so I could take the train (I'm a train person) instead of flying. 36h from Chicago out to Flagstaff, then rented a car and drove to Phoenix, picked up my buddy from the airport, and we shared a hotel room. We went to Taliesin West on the first day, because I wanted to see it -- I have a love/hate relationship with FLW (love his work, think the guy was an absolute dickhead, and had bad associations formed by failed school projects and library books that went unreturned to the UIC Library out of shame) -- and walking back out to the car in the parking lot after the tour, I saw I'd missed a call from my vet. My cat, a 19 1/2 year old diabetic half-Maine Coon that I'd raised since his mother had her kittens in my bed my freshman year in high school, who I'd boarded with the vet so he could get his twice-daily insulin, had died in his sleep overnight. I spent the rest of the three-day trip a weepy mess. The Sox lost every game including one against the Cubs where the Cubs fans were, as always and expected, assholes about everything, except once when they tied the Brewers. (But I enjoyed the sausage race.) We went to catch the Blackhawks at the Coyotes, and the Hawks lost too, because of course they did. Finally I dropped my friend at the airport, and drove back to Flagstaff, got my obligatory Sonic tots and cherry limeade for late dinner because, there were no Sonics in Illinois at that time and even while sunk into despair that my cat died alone in a kennel without me, I had a routine of always visiting Sonic when I was in the south. And I sat in my hotel room listening to this album playing back thinly from my iPhone speaker, waiting for my train.

I haven't listened to this album much, if at all, since then. But I've got it on now, and it's still got that slightly melancholic cheerful vibe that had me put it on then. I don't know if I'll ever not have that association with it, but it's a fine album.
posted by sldownard at 11:50 PM on April 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

David Byrne & St. Vincent - Who
Further St. Vincent solo: New York
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:26 AM on April 9, 2018