After that I decided to strip things down again. I recorded and toured with a four-piece band that emphasized grooves. There was a drummer, Todd Turkisher, a bass player, Paul Socolow, and a percussionist, Mauro Refosco—but no keyboard or second guitar such as one would see or hear in a typical rock band. I had written more personal songs, which were better suited to a smaller ensemble. There was little dancing, and I seem to recall I wore black again. The last few records had been recorded before their songs had been played live, so this time I wanted to go back to where I’d started. We played small, out-of-the-way clubs (and some not so out-of-the-way) to break in the material. The idea was to hone the band into a tight live unit and then essentially record live in the studio. It worked, but only sort of. I could hear discrepancies and musical problems in the studio that I had missed in the heat and passion of live performance, so some further tweaking was still required.
Around this time I’d discovered standards. I never lost the enjoyment I had in high school of playing other people’s songs in my bedroom, and gradually, going through songbook after songbook I picked up, I was adding more chords and an appreciation for melody to what I knew. Willie Nelson’s Stardust was an inspiration, as were Philadelphia soul songs, bossa novas, and songs by my favorite Brazilian and Latin singers and songwriters. But I didn’t play any of them in public. They felt delicious on the tongue, but I didn’t get them all right. I didn’t grow up on those songs, but I began to feel an appreciation for a beautiful melody and harmonies—harmonies in the chord voicings and not just in what a second singer might sing. Beauty was a revelation, and these songs were unashamed to be beautiful, which was a difficult thing to accept in the world of downtown musicians and artists. Anything that sounds or looks beautiful would seem to that crowd to be merely pretty, shallow, and therefore deeply suspect—morally suspect even, I found out. Noise, for them, is deep; beauty shallow.
Well, for a while I’d suspected that wasn’t a point of view shared by the wider world. Around 1988, when I began to compile some of my favorite tracks by Brazilian composers (pop musicians are referred to as composers in Brazil), I realized that although many of their songs were rich, harmonically complex, and, yes, beautiful, they definitely weren’t shallow. Some of these composers and singers were forced into prison and exile for their “merely pretty” songs, so I began to realize that depth, radical visions, and beauty were not mutually exclusive. Sure, bossa novas had become a staple of every bad piano bar, but the songs themselves are innovative and radical in their way. Later, younger generations of composers there absorbed influences from North American and Europop, but they didn’t feel the need to go ugly to be serious. With my new appreciation for songcraft, I wanted to have songs of my own that made me feel that way. I was no longer content to just sing other people’s songs in the shower.
Inspired by these standards I’d been listening to and by a couple of Caetano Veloso’s records, I wrote songs that emptied out the middle of the sonic spectrum of the usual pop-band instrumentation. I let the orchestrations (strings and occasional winds) do the harmonic work that guitars and keyboards often do, and once again there were drums and plenty of percussion, so the grooves were strong and thus avoided the tendencies one might associate with a nice melody and traditional balladry. Since both guitars and keyboards are close to the same range as the human voice, limiting their use meant the singing had a clearing in which to live, and I was increasingly enjoying singing in there.
In the early days, I might have gotten on stage and begun to sing as a desperate attempt to communicate, but I now found that singing was both a physical and emotional joy. It was sensuous, a pure pleasure, which didn’t take anything away from the emotions being expressed—even if they were melancholic. Music can do that; you can enjoy singing about something sad. Audiences, likewise, can dance to a tragic story. It happens all the time. My vocal technique had somehow expanded, or maybe just moved into another place, and I realized that though I could still do the desperate yelp, I wasn’t inclined to write like that anymore. My body, and the physical and emotional enjoyment I was getting from singing, was in effect telling me what to write.
I gathered a group that helped me express this: a rhythm section and a six-piece string section. We toured, and it worked. We could play arias from operas, Talking Heads songs, covers of other people’s songs, and even an extended house track. There wasn’t much show biz, but the group sounded gorgeous, which was the goal anyway.
To some extent, I let the tour finances dictate what that performance would be. I knew the size of the venues I’d be playing, and from that I could figure out how much income there would be. Carrying all these musicians along at that point in my career (I wasn’t filling halls as big as the Stop Making Sense tour did) was a financial consideration, but I was happy to be restricted in that way. I didn’t give up on the visuals completely, though. I wanted us to wear outfits that would unify us on stage, have us appear like a slightly less ragtag bunch, but the budget was limited. First I had jumpsuits made for everyone, modeled on one that I had purchased in a store. The copies didn’t turn out to be as flattering to everyone else as I’d hoped; they looked like pajamas.
A fashion mutiny understandably began building steam. We switched to Dickies—workwear with matching tops and bottoms, brown or blue or gray. Those looked somewhat like the originally envisioned jumpsuits, but now there was an everyday workwear angle. Some of the outfits got tailored a bit (the shirts got darts so they accentuated the female string players’ figures, for example), but mostly they were right out the box. I often looked like a UPS man, but I thought that in its own way it was quite elegant.N
The audiences sat and listened quietly at times, but they were usually up and dancing by the end. Best of both worlds. I had loosened up on stage by then, and I began to talk to the audience beyond reciting the names of the songs and saying a quick “Thank you very much” afterward. Often—and this never failed to surprise us—audiences at these shows would stop the show in the middle and engage in a lengthy round of applause. Standing ovations, many times. Sometimes this was after a song or two that might have been somewhat familiar and that really showed what this ensemble could do, but I sensed the audience wasn’t just clapping for specific songs. They realized that they were happy, that they were really, really enjoying what they were seeing and hearing, and they wanted to let us know. I sometimes think the audience was in a funny way also applauding for themselves. Some of them might also have been a little bit nostalgic, applauding our joint legacies as performers and audience. One forgets that part of one’s performance is one’s history—or sometimes the lack of it. You’re playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there’s baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can’t see. The audience wasn’t all aging Talking Heads fans either. There was a healthy percentage of younger folks as well, which was great to see. Maybe keeping the ticket prices affordable helped.
Photo by Tony Orlando
In 2008, I did a tour that in some ways harkened back to the Stop Making Sense extravaganza. I had collaborated on a record with Brian Eno that was more electronic folk/gospel in tone than the fierce funky workouts of Remain In Light. I realized that in order to perform this music, I’d need an ensemble similar to that touring band from more than twenty years before—multiple singers, keyboards, bass, drums, and percussion. Conveniently, with this band I could also do some of the songs we’d both been involved in, with Talking Heads and on other projects.
Once again, I had to think about what sort of a show this could be given the financial means available to me. I wanted to do something visual and theatrical again, since there wouldn’t be lush strings to wash over the audience anymore. Just standing there and playing wouldn’t be enough with this outfit—but what else was feasible? Lots of acts now use elaborate video screens and similar techniques to “make it bigger” on stage. I’d seen a few of these shows. I saw a Super Furry Animals show during which the video was totally in synch with the songs throughout the whole night. Very impressive. I’d seen pictures of U2 and other acts’ arena shows;