MUSIC Ex-Talking Heads singer branches out for creativity

David Byrne says venturing 'into the unknown ... keeps things fresh.'
(FORT WORTH) STAR-TELEGRAM
So maybe there is one genre of music David Byrne has yet to master.
"I was in Spain one time and I was doing a DJ set at a club there," he says. "I wasn't spinning house vinyl or anything you'd expect. I was just layering sounds on sounds. The guy from the record label was there and I know he was thinking, 'Well, maybe David shouldn't be doing this.' I saw it as a creative opportunity, but he was right."
Spinning records at a nightclub is possibly the only musical misstep for the former singer of the New Wave-pop group Talking Heads. Since they broke up in 1988, Byrne has released a string of solo and collaborative albums that spotlight his seemingly endless curiosity and fascination with global music, from the Latin pulses of "Rei Momo" to the brass-band/spoken word project "The Knee Plays" to his exhaustive soundtrack and score work, which won him an Academy Award in 1987 for "The Last Emperor." No two albums, it seems, are the same.
"I would like to say that stepping into the unknown, working on unfamiliar territory, keeps things fresh creatively, and leave it at that," he says. "But I also think there's some kind of weird Victorian Protestant work ethic there, too, that drives me to kind of feel like I need to keep improving or learning more. That's buried down in there somewhere."
Classical help
Backing Byrne, who was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, and raised in Baltimore, Md., on his latest effort, "Grown Backwards," is Austin, Texas' classically trained Tosca Strings.
Contrary to its name, "Grown Backwards" takes yet another step forward, combining Byrne's penchant for angular pop with arias by Bizet and Verdi.
"There were songs on my last record and certainly things on my last tour that pointed in this direction," he says of 2001's "Look Into the Eyeball," an album inspired by a show he did with the Balanescu Quartet, with which he had performed in Lisbon. "I was already halfway there. I finished my last tour with the Tosca Strings and I liked their flexibility and combination of sounds, and I found myself writing things for that group.
Byrne's ongoing exploration of global music, he knows, has probably scared off a few Talking Heads fans. At the same time, some longtime fans have hung on, while others have come aboard.
"At the last few shows, it starts off with sort of an older crowd filling the expensive seats down front," he says. "Six or seven songs into it, all these kids, down from the cheap seats in the back, are in front of them dancing. I think to myself, 'This is great."'