David Byrne and St. Vincent, $45-$75, 8 p.m. Wednesday, Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, 2800 Cobb Galleria Parkway, 770-916-2800, www.cobbenergycentre.com
“Love This Giant” — the new collaboration between David Byrne and Annie Clark, who records and performs as St. Vincent — took three years to complete and is driven by the juxtaposition of a big brass band and programmed percussion.
Byrne, still perhaps best known as the jittery psycho-intellectual frontman of Talking Heads, has gone on to win an Oscar and a Golden Globe, while collaborating on myriad music, film and theater projects.
Currently, Byrne is simultaneously on a music tour with Clark and a book tour for “How Music Works,” his brainy and entertaining new reflection on a lifetime spent making and thinking about music.
Byrne and Clark bring the “Love This Giant” tour to the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre on Wednesday night, where they’ll play songs from the album and delve into their back catalogs.
Earlier this week, Byrne spoke by phone during a stop in Washington D.C., talking about the collaboration with Clark and offering a glimpse of the tour.
Q. In “How Music Works” you note that someone once wrote that you’d “collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.”
A. That wasn't just about how much I like Doritos [laughs]. It was meant to be critical. But there's a certain bit of truth to it. Usually, if it's for a song or two, I'll say, "Sure. Why not? Let's see what happens." And most of time it's worked out pretty well, because my choices have been based on exploring musical stuff, not just that thing of putting two names together.
Q. In the book, you argue that collaboration is an essential part of creating music. What did your collaboration with Annie Clark add to your understanding of that?
A. This collaboration was more fluid, which made it deeper and richer. Sometimes she would give me a guitar riff or something and then I would deconstruct that, add a melody to it and maybe write another section, like a chorus. The border between who did what would become really fuzzy.
Q. This was a major collaboration beyond the songwriting, with the prominent horn section and the programmed percussion. With all those elements, was there a danger of not making it a coherent whole?
A. There was always that danger. We set our task of doing four songs at first. I think after we did that, we felt, "OK, this is working. We've got something and it's breaking some new ground for both of us."
Q. Though you’re different ages, you and Clark seem to have a lot in common.
A. I think we look at music, and maybe other things, somewhat analytically. I think we could both be accused of being kind of cold in that sense. I don't know about Annie, but I think for me, I've warmed up a lot in recent decades [laughs]. More recently, I've been drawn to more seductive melodies.
Q. Are there particular tracks on “Love This Giant” that stand out for you, in terms of things you accomplished?
A. I like the lyrics I wrote on songs like "The Forest Awakes" and "I Should Watch TV" and "Outside of Space and Time." I'm really proud of all of those. It was kind of a difficult task to write against the horns. You can't exactly write an intimate singer-songwriter thing. It just doesn't work against those sounds.
Q. Now that you’ve had a chance to road-test the material on tour, how’s it going?
A. We think it's going incredibly well and the audiences have been really good. We're mixing in a fair number of familiar songs, also done with the brass band. We have an eight-piece horn section, which is enough to make a really grand sound, and get funky in certain places. It's pretty great.
Q. Since at least the days of “Remain In Light” and the “Stop Making Sense” tours, you’ve been known for adding theatre and even dance to your shows. What went into staging this tour?
A. I brought in a choreographer, Annie-B Parson, who I'd worked with on my last tour. Basically, I realized that with clip-on mics, the horn players could be on different parts of the stage at different times. But she took it a lot further and got them and me and Annie [Clark] moving around. The stage gets reconfigured all the time and it really turned into something else that really surprised us. Now we can't imagine what it would have been like to do a show where we'd just stand there and play our songs.
Q. It may be the question you hate the most, but any thoughts about collaborating with your old pals from Talking Heads, again?
A. No. I haven't thought about it. I'm having too much fun doing this and I don't need the money, so.
About the Author
