David Byrne is an artist of many talents and few words.
The former Talking Head has an Oscar for scoring The Last Emperor, and a Film Critics Circle Award for the documentary of his concert, Stop Making Sense.
His musical muse will not let him be. But what brought him to town yesterday is Strange Ritual, an amazing new $35 picturebook.
As with his strange funny movie, True Stories, Strange Ritual mixes things mundane and things extraordinary, this time using his photos from all over the world, "religious artifacts, shop window displays, isolated structures in the landscape, hotel and airport room details, the public writing of `lunatics,' books, bungalows, performing chairs, faded signs ..." and lets them tell a story, lets us find what he calls "the congruencies."
The title emerged from a song on his last record. "I saw a young Indonesian girl possessed by the spirit of Mutant Ninja Turtles ... I saw a skyscraper made out of abandoned car parts ... We've got a strange ritual / We keep to ourselves ..." The lyrics have become an invocation.
"Marvin Gaye was driven nuts by the conflict between his sensual desires and his spiritual longings," Byrne says. "I wanted to hold the opposites together."
A Las Vegas art critic told him he has "an obsessive democratic sensibility," meaning that Byrne does not separate fine art from popular experience.
He feels he is at his best as an artist "when I would feel it wasn't me who was creating it, and I could still pat myself on the back for being an accurate receiver.
"And sometimes it seemed to be the most obvious idea in the world, why hadn't anyone else done it?
"Then the rest is execution ..."
What most of his work has in common, he feels, is a sense of play "but play is a very serious business.
"So I hope that the humor diffuses the pretentiousness, and the fact that I'm getting at something comes across sometimes.
"I'm back to writing songs now, so I'll see where that leads me." The sound comes first, just the bare minumum, "melody and chord changes, no words. It's like I have to be a different person to write lyrics."
For his Luaka Bop record label he is still putting together compilations. Imminent is a soundtrack for Blue In The Face, friend Paul Auster's followup to Smoke. Out now is an album of Afro-Peruvian music, very little known until very recently. Coming soon is an album that introduces Cornershop, a British group with a Bangladeshi singer-songwriter, "kind of a punk band with sitars," he says.
Obviously he enjoys travelling a lot. "I've found," he says, "that often you have to go as far away as you can get to see yourself, or understand where you live.
"Home for me is not a physical place, it's a sense of well-being." At the moment he feels at home. But it never lasts. Which is why David Byrne continues to amaze.
