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ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITAN
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I went to see David Byrne at the Berklee Performance Center a week ago Thursday figuring I’d hear mostly material from his new Grown Backwards (Nonesuch). That was fine with me: on the Letterman show the week before, he’d performed one of the new songs, "The Other Side of This Life," and after a string section played a jagged, "modern" intro, he sang his typically off-kilter lyrics ("I made a church of your hairdo/And I made a shrine of your legs") to a melody straight out of R&B propelled by percussion and electric bass. At Berklee, Byrne had the strings (two cellos, a viola, and three violins), a drummer, a percussionist who also played marimba, and bassist Paul Frazier. Everything about the show spoke to Byrne’s craftsmanship and care: the unusual and expensive band, and a selection of material that reflected his cosmopolitan musical world view. The set included a piece associated with fado diva Cesaria Évora as well as "Desconocido Soy," which he’d first recorded as a duet with Café Tacuba’s NRU. He opened with the new album’s "Glass, Concrete & Stone" (originally from the movie Dirty Pretty Things), followed with the oldie "I Zimbra," which got the old fans cranked, then the fado "Ausencia," which brought them back down, and a couple more new ones. But when he got to "Road to Nowhere" and "Once in a Lifetime" — prime, rhythm-driven Talking Heads hits — it all came rushing back: a period in the late ’70s and early ’80s when lines like "Water dissolving and water removing/There is water at the bottom of the ocean" had an inexplicable urgency that seemed to say it all. With the strings now off stage, Byrne sang with that urgency again, and he was once again that thin white neurotic, now white-haired, too, taking on multiple voices as well as genres in a single song, even slipping into an Irish brogue for half a verse. When he brought the standing, cheering crowd back down to their seats with the Verdi aria "Un dí felice, eterea," from La traviata (also on the new album), wide of pitch but ardent, it seemed a cruel tease. The second half of the nearly two-hour show built with more reliable rock-concert momentum in its mix of new and old (yes, "Psycho Killer," a "Home" more satisfyingly romantic than the Verdi, and a solo acoustic "Heaven" encore). And I don’t know what Byrne’s personal relationships are like, but as an entertainer, he’s a true gent — how many bona fide rock stars come on stage to introduce their opening act? In this case, it was the beguiling Argentine folkie Juana Molina — a performer he says he discovered on Amazon. Byrne’s ears are still open.
BY JON GARELICK
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