David Byrne

Lushly produced and overflowing with strings and strong melodies, this is Byrne's finest solo work in ages. His distinct voice lends an air of familiarity to grand missives that fuse Tin Pan Alley-style pop and the avant-garde. Byrne also has the good sense to cover a Lambchop song and duet with Rufus Wainwright.

Reports from the streets of New York, which is always the odds-on spot for a David Byrne
sighting, suggest that the former leader of Talking Heads has been working a Mr. Rogers
look. But judging from Grown Backwards, his sixth solo album, Byrne is still broadcasting
from a neighborhood, or planet, all his own. The songs and opera selections (he performs
bits of Bizet and Verdi) are gently loopy: They could coax a bemused smile out o... More >

The two opera selections signify one thing, and it's not that those voice lessons have finally paid off. It's that more even than Randy Newman or Tom Waits (or Sting), this likable Manhattan progressive conceives himself as a performer of artsongs. As a writer of same he has his moments. Somebody somewhere could do justice to the absurdly abject "Glad" or the smarmily rationalized "Empire" or "She Only Sleeps," the love tribute of a sex worker's boyfriend. Byrne cannot. His voice devoid of Newman-Waits grit, his eclecticism even and controlled where theirs bristles with jokes, oddity, and gusto, how does he expect to connect with anyone but other likable progressives, and rather detached and inscrutable ones at that? The guy's been championing the ordinary since More Songs About Buildings and Food. But he makes such a point of approaching it from the outside you have to wonder whether as far as he's concerned that isn't just more exoticism, which for him is the only thing that comes naturally. (Grade - C+)