David Byrne was a young man playing at a mid-life
crisis when he first sang "Once In A Lifetime" with Talking Heads, a song from
1980's Remain In Light—the band's third and final collaboration with Brian
Eno. Byrne is genuinely middle-aged now, and on Everything That Happens Will
Happen Today,
his first work with Eno in 27 years, it sounds as if the introspection of "Once
In A Lifetime" stopped being an academic exercise a long time ago. "The dimming
of the light makes the picture clearer," Byrne sings as the album opens,
establishing a sunset glow that shines on much of the album to come.
What follows also sounds only a little like what
listeners might expect of a renewed Eno/Byrne partnership. Their 1981 album My
Life In The Bush Of Ghosts pushed their interest in ambience, found sounds, and African
music to a beautiful extreme. But here, the only shocks come from the way the
album sticks to traditional structures and what Byrne calls a "folk-electronic-gospel
feeling" that swaps gentle ruminations for sharp edges and challenging rhythms.
It's a bit like Cheech and Chong reuniting to perform Molière.
Everything That Happens is an unexpected album,
but a stirring one nonetheless. Though uptempo tracks like "I Feel My Stuff"
sound a bit rusty around the hinges, Byrne and Eno find warmth and focus on
tracks like "One Fine Day" (a song inspired by Dave Eggers' What Is The
What?)
and "Everything That Happens," which wrap the philosophizing in carefully
layered instrumentation and soaring choruses that make the album feel like an
alternate route to the same destination. They even manage a half-reprise of "Once
In A Lifetime" with "The River," whose lyrics find Byrne beginning as a singer
in a restaurant, getting carried away by rising waters, then getting reborn on
the same stage. Same as it ever was.