Don't tell anyone, but David Byrne and Brian Eno have a new album.
OK, so it's not exactly a secret. But a key facet of their first extended collaboration in 27 years was their decision not to trumpet the arrival of "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today" in the usual way. There's no record company marketing campaign, no ads in trade magazines, on radio or MTV, in part because there's no record company.
"People are just kind of discovering it," Byrne, 56, said from Phoenix on Monday, following a concert the previous night in Albuquerque, part of his tour that reaches the Greek Theatre tonight. "We did it without any of the traditional stuff that a record company would do. We thought, 'Let's see what happens if you don't do that.' "
The music so far is available only through the Everything That Happens website that the Grammy-winning pop-music innovators set up for this project. It's available free for streaming, or it can be downloaded in three ways: digital only ($8.99, including a lyric booklet), digital plus a physical CD that will be shipped at the end of November ($11.99) or a deluxe version for $69.99 that includes four bonus tracks, a short film about the album, a hard-bound book, screen saver and other extras.
"It's an experiment," Byrne said. "But we've recouped our costs already, and that's nothing to sneeze at these days."
In the coming weeks, he said, the album will be turning up on iTunes, Amazon.com and other online retailers, but the no-strings-attached delivery method is in keeping with the music itself. It's a gorgeous, ethereal yet intrinsically human meeting of Byrne's voice, guitars and other acoustic instruments, and Eno's trademark electronic sounds. They describe the result as "folk-electronic gospel."
Byrne wrote many of the lyrics for a series of ambient soundscapes that Eno had created previously to convey a spiritual dimension, though one that's never far removed from the realities of life on Earth:
Tiny little boats on a beach
at sunset
I took a drink from a jar
& into my head
Familiar smells and flavors
Vehicles are stuck on the
plains of heaven
That's a verse from the opening track, "Home." Like the rest of the album's songs, it long existed only as an instrumental, one of many Eno never got around to finishing. The subject of Eno's growing stockpile of incomplete songs came up during a conversation with Byrne, and rock 'n' roll gentleman that he is, the former Talking Head offered to take a stab at writing words for them. If Eno didn't like his lyrics, he could feel free to discard them, Byrne offered.
