![]() ![]() Its songs aren’t about anything they’re simply headblown musings about the world. ![]() It’s a beautiful piece of work, a strange and twitchy and gorgeous album. If you’ve never heard Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, you should. ![]() And that, in a weird way, is when the entire seismic shift in my life became real. On my way to work that morning, I robotically put Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, David Byrne and Brian Eno’s collaborative album, on my iPod - not for any real special reason, but because it had just come out and because I’d been listening to it a lot around then. It was, after all, a Tuesday morning, and you aren’t supposed to tell anyone about pregnancies until they’re a lot further along. Instead, she pretty much did that for me. I should’ve held my wife’s hand through that moment of transition, supporting her and letting her know that everything was going to be OK. For a longer-than-probably-appropriate time, I convinced myself that it wasn’t real, that the pregnancy test had somehow fucked up. I didn’t know what the fuck to do with this information. American Utopia is an album of beautiful and witty surfaces stretched over a sea of troubled waters, and if Byrne is rarely inclined to give direct answers to the questions he asks, it's obvious this isn't a joke, it's an ambitious work from an important American artist.One Tuesday morning, just a little under 10 years ago, my wife and I learned that she was pregnant. In concept, American Utopia bears faint resemblance to the cheerfully odd average Americans who populated Talking Heads' 1986 album True Stories (and Byrne's accompanying feature film), but this album's wit is more pointed, the tone is cooler and less secure, and the cumulative effect less joyous and a bit more puzzled about what awaits us with the next dawn. The final product is a sonic crazy quilt that's rich and evocative, by turns ominous and seductive, and the stylistic shape-shifting that dominates these tracks suits the many moods of Byrne's characters very well indeed. (Animals, too - a variety of critters pop up in "Every Day Is a Miracle," and "Dog's Mind" imagines how our canine friends view the world.) Not everything in Byrne's Bizarro World America is a good time, especially on "Gasoline and Dirty Sheets" and "This Is That." But much of this album portrays folks who are both dazzled and overwhelmed by the abundant possibilities presented in "It's Not Dark Up Here," "Everybody's Coming to My House," and "I Dance Like This." American Utopia began as a series of rhythm tracks created by Brian Eno, which Byrne then fashioned into songs, with a variety of other collaborators reshaping the results, including co-producers Rodaidh McDonald and Patrick Dillett and musicians Daniel Lopatin, Thomas Bartlett, and Joey Waronker. At a time when America has been thrown into a state of chaos - something Byrne witnessed and creatively reacted to as an artist during the Reagan era - here he imagines what appears to be an alternate version of the United States and the people who live in it. "Is this meant ironically? Is it a joke? Do I mean this seriously? In what way?" David Byrne seems to be simultaneously inviting and acknowledging some likely reactions to his 2018 album, American Utopia, in his own liner notes. ![]()
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