[Photo: David Byrne, Metropolitan Hotel, 2001, by Lorne Bridgman]

This brief interview was done while David Byrne was in Toronto in 2001 promoting his under-appreciated Look Into My Eyeball disc (personal favourite among his post-Talking Heads work). To me the album sounded then like a departure, even more musically varied than usual for Byrne, largely based on tunes he originally workshopped with a string quartet, and oddly graceful. All the songs are about human relations, hence the title. Almost ten years later, it doesn’t sound a departure at all, just another surprising bend on a unmapped road.

Lorne Bridgman and I somehow convinced Byrne to leave his room and join us in the stairwell for a quick photo-shoot. The publicist was a little perturbed but Byrne was game. And he generously posed however Lorne asked him to. Very pleasant, soft-spoken guy that radiates a calm aura of hyper-awareness. Or maybe it’s that he has reptilian eyes and hardly ever seems to blink. As you can see he was wearing this shiny, blue-green, military-cut uniform that made him look like an old-guard Chinese communist.

Byrne had just gotten back from somewhere overseas, don’t recall where exactly, so we started by talking about his travels in general and how they had influenced him creatively, particularly his live performances.

DAVID BYRNE: When I was younger [with the Talking Heads] I was determined that as a stage performer, what I did on stage — the lighting, what I wore, how I moved — had to be totally honest and natural. Nothing artificial or stagey or show-bizzy about it. We’d go on stage with our street clothes on, and tell the lighting guy: “Take off all the gels, we want just the white light. Turn them on when we go on and turn them off when we leave. Don’t do anything else with it.”

Which was fine, but it was a way of being in denial, a denial that the stage is a kind of ritual space — it’s totally artificial, there’s no way that someone getting up on stage is being natural. If someone feels natural on stage it’s because they’ve perfected the act of being on stage.

That had finally occurred to me only when I was travelling in the East, in Japan, Hong Kong and Bali with some friends. Everywhere I went I kept going to theatre performances. In Japan, I saw Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku. And I saw the long Ramayana and Mahabharata epics that are performed on Bali and in other Hindu cultures. These performances will go on for days and days and days, the audience just wanders in and out, and they’ll eat, go and come back. I thought this was amazing. The stylized way people performed on stage, they don’t move or dress or act or speak anything remotely like they speak in real life, there’s no attempt at naturalism.

This all seemed very modern to me, more modern than the fake naturalism that’s in most Western acting, or this fake naturalism that I was going for.

Anyway, it took travel for me to hold a mirror up to myself. It made me reflect upon my own preconceptions and those of my own culture and those of downtown New York. It didn’t make me feel like I was an expert in any way about Eastern theatrical traditions, far from it. It worked as an experience that made me re-think my own experience, my own preconceptions.

On this new record you collaborated with someone different on almost every track. And stylistically it’s all over the map. But it coheres in a way — lyrically, sonically — that sounds something like a new direction.

There were things I’d written that seemed more in the style of things I’d written in the past. I took those out! I was aware it was going to be a mishmash of a record, that it would have kind-of pop songs, but pop songs with a little twist to them — art songs, or whatever. I was pretty sure it was going to work.

With all those collaborators, you’re sometimes relying on technology to make that happen. For the song “Smile” you e-mailed a file to Jacques Morelenbaum (Caetano Veloso’s producer) to have him arrange it. How did you like working in this way? More artists are already collaborating this way.

It works great if you can give somebody your tracks on a computer disc or e-mail them wherever in the world they are. On the other hand I am kind of a stickler for being face to face and working something out creatively. I find it works best when everyone gets around a table and lays out all the ideas and people start pushing them around, going “What if you put this with this.” No doubt you could do all that stuff over email but it ends up taking 20 times as long. You just don’t get the same kind of back and forth. So I think there’s a limit to what you can do.

But sometimes it is fun to just throw something out there in the universe, like a crap-shoot, and see what comes back, whether it’s an arrangement or a remix.

Sometimes it is great to purposefully leave things blurry, or not articulate what you want and leave somebody to misinterpret what they think you want, or what they would like you to think they want.

You’re involved in so many things: running a small music label (Luaka Bop), art projects, filmmaking, and other non-pop music projects. Do you think you’ll ever give up being a pop musician/songwriter to focus on the other stuff?

I can see a time when the songs I write are so out of sync with what the public finds interesting, but that I’m still doing them only on a smaller scale. I can conceive of stopping, pop music is not the only type of music I do, but there’s something powerful about that form that does stick out in your head. It can be stretched pretty far and adopted to all sorts of sounds and yet some form of the pop song is still there. That seems to me something I can always do.

Some live versions of songs from Look Into The Eyeball…