bicycle diaries cruising american utopia

(Luaka Bop, the joyously impurist global-pop label Byrne founded in 1988, brought notable Brazilian weirdos like Tom Zé and Os Mutantes back into circulation via Byrne-curated compilations.) I thought, That's going on the shelf.”) Here is a trophy Byrne received from a samba school in Rio for all he's done to promote Brazilian music abroad. (“For a couple extra dollars,” Byrne says, “they'll send you the holy sacrament. Here's a bottle of wine from the Universal Life Church, whose ministry Byrne joined in order to officiate at the wedding of his longtime percussionist, Mauro Refosco. Ask and David Byrne will show you around the shelves. Some of the shelves are little voodoo-style altars commemorating a lifetime (i.e., Byrne's lifetime) of world travel, ephemera-accretion, and award-getting. Ponder whether any other Rock & Roll Hall of Famer's library includes both Money Into Light (John Boorman's diary from the making of The Emerald Forest in the Brazilian jungle) and What Wood Is That? (“an invaluable resource for builders, homeowners, and hobbyists”). The enormous yellow metal shelving unit behind him holds physical media-vinyl, CDs, and thousands of books, with sections labeled MUSIC, COMICS, ETHNOGRAPHY, ART/RITUAL, and so on. When Byrne appears, everything he's wearing is black except his saddle shoes. Note how everyone who works for David Byrne is the hippest person you've ever met. Enjoy a cup of coffee fetched by a Todomundo staffer with a Jean-Seberg-as-Joan-of-Arc haircut, a woman so hip she's never heard a podcast. Their houses are in motion.ĭavid Byrne will be in the back, wrapping up a call. The little people in the painting are floating up to heaven. The Finster in Byrne's foyer depicts a Day of Judgment–type situation in which earth loses its gravity. The first thing you see when you get off on the correct floor is a painting by Howard Finster, the outsider artist and Baptist preacher whose illustration of Byrne as an Atlas in tighty-whities adorned the cover of the Talking Heads album Little Creatures. If the door slides open and the staff of a boiler-roomish telephone-sales operation turn away from a corkboard hung with printouts about cruise-ship-vacation packages to stare balefully at you like body snatchers about to unhinge their jaws and shriek, go back down-you're on the wrong floor.

The elevator that leads up to Todomundo-David Byrne’s Manhattan studio, which is hidden in a drab building on lower Broadway, just up from Canal Street-can be tetchy. Now, with his first solo record in 14 years, Byrne is attempting his trickiest act of subversion yet: finding stuff to feel good about in 2018. For over four decades, the rock 'n' roll icon has carved out a career by zagging when everyone else was zigging-whether with his band Talking Heads or with collaborators ranging from Brian Eno to St.

Bicycle diaries cruising american utopia