#Songs in american utopia skin
#Songs in american utopia full

It's a song with Daniel Lopatin on drums and keyboards and Byrne on guitar and voice, singing about how the brain processes the world.

#Songs in american utopia full

'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.' It also sees this miraculous world from a tongue's perspective and a cockroach's.Īmerican Utopia's closing song is called 'Here' and sums up much of what David Byrne's art conveys. The song 'Every Day Is A Miracle' looks at the world not through human eyes but through the eyes of a chicken.

#Songs in american utopia skin

Byrne's lyrics are matter-of-fact as he sings, 'The bullet went into him / His skin did part in two / Skin that women had touched / The bullet passed on through.'īut beyond the potent subjects, there's plenty of funny stuff in these observations. 'Bullet' describes a killing from the perspective of bullet passing through a body. The song 'Gasoline And Dirty Sheets' examines the proliferation of advertising, fast food and crazy consumption as seen through the eyes of a refugee. The music is intense, it's playful and quite memorable.Īmerican Utopia takes vignettes from day-to-day life, magnifies them and lays them out for us to rethink how we see the world. But, suffice it to say, that inspiration for this record came from an awful lot of talent. The list of contributors is actually longer than this. But solo in his case doesn't mean alone it means 'Everybody's Coming to My House,' the title of the album's penultimate track and an apt description of the record's cast of characters.Īmerican Utopia's origins began with tracks from Brian Eno and it grew and morphed from there, bringing in other collaborators and musicians, including producer Rodaidh McDonald (The xx, King Krule, Adele), producer Patrick Dillett (Nile Rogers, Sufjan Stevens,) drummer Joey Waronker (Atoms for Peace, Beck), Isaiah Barr on sax (Onyx Collective) Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman) on mellotron, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) on keys and electronics, singer and pianist Sampha and Brian Eno on keys, brass, whistling, robot rhythm guitar and more. American Utopia is billed as David Byrne's first solo album since 2004. His albums and myriad other projects have been made possible by a lifetime of collaborators that include Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison of the band Talking Heads, his now four-decade friendship with producer Brian Eno and, more recently, with the artists St. This brilliantly analytical album is from David Byrne - an American treasure, an artistic thinker and creator responsible, in part, for the some of the most memorable and distinctive music of the past 40 years. If a brain in a jar could observe the world, make sense of it and churn it into a batch of songs, it would make the album American Utopia.