13: African Counterpoint

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Fela Kuti: Fear No Man

Episode 13: African Counterpoint

Host: Jad Abumrad
Date: January 30, 2026
Guests: Michael Veal, Ruby Walsh, Randall Wolf, Brian Eno, David Byrne
Theme:
This bonus essay episode explores the deep musicological roots and revolutionary cultural context of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, focusing on the idea of “African counterpoint.” Through interviews and vivid storytelling, Jad Abumrad and guests examine how Fela’s music paralleled and challenged Western traditions, reshaping both personal and artistic paradigms for musicians and listeners worldwide.

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Main Theme & Purpose

The episode seeks to illuminate the concept of “African counterpoint” in Fela Kuti’s work—juxtaposing it against the history of Western classical music—and show how music can encode entire ways of being, consciousness, and society. Through personal anecdotes and insights from musicians, ethnomusicologists, and producers, it traces how encountering Fela's music shifted understandings of art, identity, and political expression for generations to come.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Reframing Fela’s Global Recognition

• [00:00] Jad Abumrad addresses Fela Kuti’s recent Lifetime Achievement Grammy, underlining how typical narratives miss the complexities and innovations in his music.
• Quote [00:14]: “But there’s something about those storylines that a lot gets lost, right. A lot of the interestingness of the music gets missed. And Fela was doing some pretty revolutionary stuff with his music.”

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2. African Counterpoint vs. Western Counterpoint

Michael Veal’s Ethnomusicological Perspective

• [03:48] Michael Veal introduces “African counterpoint” as a framework: building music in complex, layered grooves, distinct from Western linear/horizontal counterpoint.
  • “He was a genius of what I call African counterpoint. How you take these parts and you put them together.” [03:48]
  • Veal emphasizes interlocking lines, grooves, and rhythms that encode collective, social consciousness.
  • “These grooves...are not just music. They represent structures of consciousness, cultural consciousness, political consciousness.” [07:00]

Western Counterpoint Explained

• [08:24] Ruby Walsh & Randall Wolf break down Western musical terms for novices:
  • Counterpoint = more than one melody or stream of activity at the same time.
  • Early examples: Gregorian chant (homophony), then Renaissance/Baroque polyphony (Palestrina, Bach), culminating in complex modern examples (Stravinsky).
• Memorable Analogy: Ruby pictures Western counterpoint as “overhearing the private prayers of two people...both engaged in worship, but they've got their own relationship to God.” [12:10]
• Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring signals a societal rupture, with cacophonous, independent layers symbolizing modernity—opening a conceptual bridge to Fela.

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3. Music as Social Model & Living Geography

• Jad and Michael Veal synthesize:
  • Fela’s music “is really just the encoding of a social order into musical sound.” [18:53 Veal; 19:05 Jad]
  • Each instrument/voice is like a character in a crowded city or market—contradictory, coexistent, forming a complex whole.
  • “It's a social paradigm. It's a model for how people interact, encoded into a musical structure.” [19:06, Veal]
• This becomes tangible during Jad’s visit to Lagos’ Mushin Market [20:11+]:
  • The overwhelming, vibrant multiplicity of Lagos is sonically mirrored in Fela’s dense, polyrhythmic arrangements.
  • “You're gonna want a sound that is aggressive. It's not small, like a little four piece… but 30 musicians on stage, all mixing different sounds and cultures, kind of like in the market.” [22:57, Jad]

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4. Transformative Encounters: Eno and Byrne

• Brian Eno and David Byrne’s Stories
  • Eno’s UK record store discovery of Fela’s Aphrodisiac (late 1973) profoundly shifted his sense of musical possibility.
    • “It absolutely blew my mind. I thought, this is really an amazing new form of music... this is kind of the future of music.” [29:18, Eno]
    • What stunned Eno: “A big group of people... just getting into a zone and staying there for a long time. Not a song, but a place.” [30:08, Eno]
  • When Byrne, then a tense and introverted rising rock star, heard Fela’s music through Eno, it was a paradigm shift.
    • “They're doing stuff with the instruments that I'm familiar with, but they're playing them and arranging them in completely different ways that I'd never heard before... This is really liberating.” [31:49, Byrne]
    • The rhythmic layering fostered a communal rather than egocentric musical experience.
    • “This is music where no one part is more important than the others... This is kind of an acoustic model for... a more perfect community.” [35:09, Byrne]
  • Personal Impact:
    • For Byrne, it countered his sense of artistic alienation (“a little bit Asperger y introverted”), allowing him to musically—and later personally—engage in community and interaction through sound. [36:10+]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Jad Abumrad on Fela’s Music as Social Order:
  • “Music is a way of listening to all the things that make up a society... relationships and the agreements and the norms and all that stuff that’s sort of below the level of awareness.” [19:13]
• David Byrne on Artistic Liberation:
  • “This is a way of working with other people, but musically, socially might come later. But musically, this is really working and I'm feeling it.” [36:19]
• Brian Eno on the Essence of Afrobeat:
  • “The duration really is a signal to say, this isn't a song. It's a way of saying: This is a place… you’re entering into that place.” [30:08]
  • “This isn't a song, this is a place. We're just making a space... You find your place in it... It's there, and you can look around inside it.” [38:22, Eno]
• Michael Veal on Fela’s Portal:
  • “You're not going in romanticizing Africa, you're going in seeing all of the hardcore problems and contradictions. But it's a beautiful vehicle because underneath all of it, that beautiful groove is just chugging along.” [23:55]
• Ruby Walsh’s Epiphany:
  • “It's not necessarily about how their music sounds... With both [Stravinsky and Fela], they weren’t using counterpoint to construct a more perfect whole. It's more like they were using it as this tool, the tool to play with contradiction... The music itself becomes a container for contradiction.” [17:31]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:00-01:56] — Framing the bonus essay and introducing the “African counterpoint” concept.
• [03:40-06:05] — Michael Veal explains Fela’s compositional genius and African counterpoint.
• [07:30-13:55] — Ruby Walsh and Randall Wolf dissect Western counterpoint for beginners.
• [15:00-17:31] — Stravinsky’s counterpoint, modern social chaos, and connection to Fela.
• [18:53-20:11] — Music as model of society; the Lagos market as sonic metaphor.
• [23:50-24:18] — Michael Veal on the unromanticized yet beautiful complexity of Afrobeat.
• [24:49-31:13] — Brian Eno narrates his first encounter with Fela’s records, conceptual leap.
• [31:49-36:19] — David Byrne on liberation through communal music-making, shift in creative and personal identity.
• [38:22-38:47] — Brian Eno on music-as-space.

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Conclusion: The Transformative Power of Afrobeat

The episode closes by asserting Fela’s music is not just entertainment or protest but a deeply encoded, participatory experience of community, contradiction, and possibility. Through “African counterpoint,” listeners are invited to inhabit a sonic landscape as rich, messy, and real as any lived society.

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For newcomers:
This episode offers a vivid, multifaceted exploration of Fela Kuti's lasting impact—not just as an African musician celebrated at last by the Grammys, but as a brilliant innovator whose work permanently expanded the boundaries of what music can convey, contain, and enact in the world.

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Transcript

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, it's Jad. So the series is technically over, but I. I was inspired to put out this bonus essay, let's call it a bonus essay, because, well, Fella's been in the news a lot recently. You may have heard that he got a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys. Long overdue. I don't know, maybe this series had something to do with that. Certainly didn't hurt. But likely what's going to happen is that that award is going to get talked about in a certain way. That here is a, quote, african musician finally getting his due. And that is, of course, true. But there's something about those storylines that a lot gets lost, Right. A lot of the interestingness of the music gets missed. And Fella was doing some pretty revolutionary stuff with his music. So what I'd love to do in this essay is just reconstruct for you one of the many musicological wormholes that we fell into while making the series. This one's kind of for the music nerds, although I don't know if that's really fair. I mean, it's really for anybody who believes that music can contain everything about us. Okay. So just to frame things, this particular journey juxtaposes Fela against the entire history of Western classical music. It's going to take us to a crowded marketplace in Lagos, one of the most crowded places in the world, and into a beautiful conversation with two people that you may know.

[Brian Eno]

Absolutely blew my mind. Brian Eno, this is really an amazing new form of music, and David Byrne.

[David Byrne]

When I heard Fela, I realized, oh, they're doing stuff that I'd never heard before. And I thought, this is really liberating. I have to respond to this music in a very different way than the stuff I was doing before.

[Jad Abumrad]

That conversation. I think it's really special and I'm glad we can put it here. To start, we have to go back to the very beginning, the very first interview that we did for this project. This is July 6th, 2022.

[Michael Veal]

Are you recording this now?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, well, I am, but I haven't actually started. So it's just. This is tape of. In Inwood, New York, in the apartment of Michael Veal, professor of ethnomusicology at Yale. Test, test, test.

[Michael Veal]

Speak strongly.

[Jad Abumrad]

So can I come around? To where? To your side?

[Michael Veal]

Yeah. Let me get kidding you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. Michael is a musician himself, in addition to being a scholar. And when we first arrived, we spent. I've never seen so many records and books in one apartment a good 10 minutes trying to figure out where to do the interview, because in his living room, he had instruments everywhere and stacks of records where one would expect to find a couch or an armchair. At this point, we didn't know what the series was going to be at all. We. That Michael had written the book on Fela. And so he was going to be our first stop. And he told us that he discovered Fela in his early 20s when he was living in Boston and playing in a band. What was your music at that point? Was it jazz?

[Michael Veal]

It was like a kind of funk, experimental funk thing.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. And one day he'd gone out to meet this guy who worked at an indie record label to try and get the guy to buy his record.

[Michael Veal]

And he didn't really. He wasn't really feeling it. And he said, but now, if it was something like Fela, I might be interested. So I said, well, what is that? I don't even know what you're talking about. So he took out this stack of records, put it on the sound system, And it blew my mind.

[Jad Abumrad]

He was like, this song is 25 minutes long, straight groove, you know.

[Michael Veal]

So that was the first thing that got me.

[Jad Abumrad]

The endless groove of it.

[Michael Veal]

Well, because the guy was a genius at composing grooves. That was his grooves. Choral lines, chants, horn lines, you know, he was a genius of what I call African counterpoint. How you take these parts and you put them together.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay? So that. That phrase you just said, what I.

[Michael Veal]

Call African counterpoint, you know, that's where I fell in.

[Jad Abumrad]

You're getting me really excited right now because I. Michael was making a connection. I just did not expect 16th century counterpoint, you know, Bach preludes and fugues, the way that all the melodies interweave and braid together. I went to music school. This is taught as if it is the absolute pinnacle of all music. What Michael seemed to be saying is that Fela's music is just as complicated.

[Michael Veal]

If you study Western classical music, Johann Sebastian Bach and all those people in that lineage, you know, they're masters of counterpoint. But there's an Africanist approach to counterpoint also.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm just wondering what you're thinking of when you say counterpoint in Fela's music.

[Michael Veal]

Building music in layers, and every layer has a different density, level of activity. So if you hear something that goes ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's a repeating line. And it could be boring if it just repeats verbatim, you know, forever. But then you take another Line, and you put that on top of it. Make that line interlock with the fundamental.

[Randall Wolf]

Line.

[Michael Veal]

And then you put another line on top of that. And then you bring in a drum set. So you've got all these lines. That's Vela song upside down, by the way. So there you've got already three principles that comprise the practice of African counterpoint.

[Jad Abumrad]

As Michael described it. In Western counterpoint, like in Bach, you will have different melodies sort of chasing each other. One melody happens, and then another comes along and starts chasing it. That's what a fugue is. So it's a horizontal counterpoint, like the melodies are separated in time. In fellas music, the counterpoint is vertical because you have all of these somewhat static layers stacked on top of each other. But you can hear this intricate conversation between the lay. One says something, another responds. One is fast, another is slow.

[Michael Veal]

There are different layers of rhythm. You take a number of small repeating parts and you network them together into a composite, which is very complex.

[Jad Abumrad]

That first conversation with Michael, we talked about this idea for hours. First it was just about music, but then it spun out into all kinds of things.

[Michael Veal]

These grooves, these rhythm patterns, these beats, as they would say today, it's not just music. They represent structures of consciousness, cultural consciousness, political consciousness. You know what I mean?

[Jad Abumrad]

This, for me, was one of the first moments where I got really excited about doing this series, that we were going to be able to use music to explore so many other things. But then an interesting thing happened. At a certain point in the conversation, our lead producer, Ruby Walsh, stepped in and asked a very sensible question, which is, what the fuck are you both talking about?

[Ruby Walsh]

Can I ask the question? As a music novice, I don't speak.

[Michael Veal]

Are you a music lover, though?

[Ruby Walsh]

I'm a music lover, but I don't speak fluent music the way that Chad does.

[Michael Veal]

Not getting too technical?

[Ruby Walsh]

No, not at all. It's great.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ruby jumped in and was basically like, can we just slow down for a second and define the terms? What actually is counterpoint? Like, what do we usually mean when we say it? Even after the interview, we were talking and I mean, am I right? Like, you were saying things just weren't clicking?

[Ruby Walsh]

Yeah. I think that when we were talking about it, you know, Bach was coming up, fugues were coming up, and I couldn't really hear the relationship between those composers and Fella. I felt like I was missing a step. And that led me to reach out to Randy. I was going to test your level. So we're recording now. Or Randall Wolf is his professional name. What'd you have for breakfast today? This is all testing.

[Randall Wolf]

I had huevos rancheros.

[Ruby Walsh]

He's this composer who works for the Brooklyn Philharmonic and many other places, but he lives in my neighborhood. And, yeah, I just emailed him and thought, you know, could I. Could I understand this better? I actually only recorded it for my own notes. Never intended to play this for anyone, but here we are.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, I sort of asked that we play it because I think this is a really interesting conversation. It doesn't really begin being about Fela. It's more about Western classical music because you were just trying to sort of get background on what these terms mean. But it put this idea into the room that I never thought of.

[Ruby Walsh]

Okay, so I'm here to talk about counterpoint, and we said that we were going to agree that I'm an idiot.

[Randall Wolf]

You said that.

[Ruby Walsh]

I said that we're agreeing that I don't know anything, and we can proceed with that understanding. So how do you explain it to your students?

[Randall Wolf]

Well, at its simplest, counterpoint means having more than one melody at the same time or more than one stream of activity at the same time.

[Ruby Walsh]

When I sat down with Randy, he pulled up a YouTube video for me.

[Randall Wolf]

The Western tradition started out with Gregorian.

[Jad Abumrad]

Chant.

[Randall Wolf]

Which I assume you're familiar with.

[Ruby Walsh]

I can't say that I was super familiar with Gregorian chant, but I had the gist. You know, I pictured a monastery, semicircle of men in hoods. Sometimes I picture them all looking up. Randy explained to me that this is what homophony sounds like. This very unified, clear sound. All these people singing the same thing at the same time, bowing to the same God in unison.

[Randall Wolf]

So counterpoint started when they had more than one Gregorian chant at the same time. This is a piece from the no Sriranam school.

[Ruby Walsh]

This is from the middle ages, roughly 1198.

[Randall Wolf]

And they took the notes of a chant and stretched them out very long, and then on top of it, they put faster notes that are made from little bits of the chant. So when I said there's relationships between things in counterpoint, you have. The difference is you have super long notes and then very fast little notes. Also, the little notes are made out of the long, slow notes. So anyways, this is the music of Perrotin from the Middle Ages.

[David Byrne]

Jesus.

[Randall Wolf]

I had to get to at least one change of note.

[Ruby Walsh]

It was very beautiful.

[Randall Wolf]

It's. It's really. Yeah, it's a wonderful kind of religious contemplation music.

[Ruby Walsh]

All right, so this was a little more complex. I was still picturing the church. But this time, it's almost like I was overhearing the private prayers of two people both engaged in worship, but they've got their own relationship to God. And I think that's what Randy told me, is that this is what happened as Western music progressed from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, is that things got more and more complex. And the number of distinct voices or melodies that you could hear grew from 2 to 4 to 8, to.

[Randall Wolf]

And the high point of this Renaissance style is Palestrina's Pope Marcellus Mass. It's in every. Every college music history class. They say it's one of those apocryphal kind of stories that the Pope was going to. Can't get rid of complicated counterpoint because it was too distracting in the service. And Palestrina said, I can write a music that won't be distracting from the lyrics. It's almost certainly not true, but it's a nice story. So the Pope Marcellus.

[Ruby Walsh]

In this case, I could really hear how Bach came out of this tradition. I can hear that complexity that Michael was talking about and how. How the music builds in layers. It's almost like there's a musical idea at the center. That's how Randy explained it. There's this musical idea at the center, and each line or stream of activity is tossing that idea back and forth. But if I'm being honest, I think that in the case of the Gregorian chants and these compositions by Palestrina and even those of Bach, I almost forget about the intricacy of all of them, because each layer builds so seamlessly that you don't even notice how complicated they are. It's so harmonious. But then Randy jumped forward in time and things started to sound just completely different.

[Randall Wolf]

So enough old music. What else do I have? This is a very famous modern piece. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

[Ruby Walsh]

Yeah, I think I know this one.

[Randall Wolf]

Actually. It starts out. It's supposed to be pagan Russian Spring. And the pipers come out. Each little village has their own piper, and they're each playing their little tune. So that's how Stravinsky described this. So this begins with the melody on the bassoon, and then more and more melodies pile up. But unlike all the music we've been listening to, it doesn't make regular chords or really any kind of predictable harmony. It sounds like. Kind of like a mess. But this is also one of the great achievements of counterpoint.

[Jad Abumrad]

Simon Rattle on London Symphony.

[Randall Wolf]

So I meant mess in the best possible sense. And no one had done anything like this before. And so many layers of tunes that really don't fit together in any kind of conventional way.

[Ruby Walsh]

So what was interesting to me about this is while I was listening, I wasn't picturing the church anymore. That underlying social order, that sense of harmony, was totally gone. It felt more like a conversation between lots of people. Lots of people that share nothing, really, other than they happen to be in the same place at the same time. When I listen to this, I completely see that image of all these different groups coming together. And you can see, like a village emerge in the composition. It's almost like I could see the peddler and the baker and the bird. Every instrument section brings in a new image or feeling for me. Such a diverse ecosystem. So many different elements working, some working again, some working with each other. It was really beautiful. Stravinsky, Fela, those are not names that I imagined putting next to each other. But it was only when I listened to Stravinsky that I felt like I really got it. That I could hear how counterpoint, this idea that Michael had put us onto, how it related to Fela. You know, it's not necessarily about how their music sounds. Stravinsky's not weaving grooves or anything like that. It's that with both of them, they weren't using counterpoint to construct a more perfect whole. It's more like they were using it as this tool, the tool to play with contradiction. You know, that idea of taking all these voices and putting them in the same place. Not necessarily even making them speak to each other, but hearing them all at once. The music itself becomes a container for contradiction.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, Ruby, that was so good.

[Ruby Walsh]

Great.

[Jad Abumrad]

And this was a real light bulb moment for me when I heard the tape that you gathered. And I ended up taking that idea back to Michael Veal. When I hear some of the songs, I almost imagine a town. That the music is a kind of geography.

[Michael Veal]

It is.

[Jad Abumrad]

I hear the complexity that's in a town.

[Michael Veal]

In a way, it is, because it's really just the encoding of a social order into musical sound.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow, that's interesting.

[Michael Veal]

It's a social paradigm. It's a model for how people interact, encoded into a musical structure.

[Jad Abumrad]

That phrase stuck in my head for weeks. That idea that music is a way of listening to all the things that make up a society. Like the relationships and the agreements and the norms and all that stuff that's sort of below the level of awareness. Right. That somehow music is a way to hear that stuff. Now, this was just an interesting thought for us that we didn't really know what to do with until we landed in Lagos. Then it got very concrete.

[Michael Veal]

Now, your fault be that, may I say now, your fault be that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because it's one thing to listen to a fella in Brooklyn, but when you are in Lagos in a car and he's just playing on the radio, which happened constantly, it just hits so different.

[Michael Veal]

You're like, oh, now I get it.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is something we all kind of know. But if you think about it, why. Why would it sound so different? Anyhow, I'll tell you the moment when it really hit me. Towards the end of the trip, we visited a neighborhood called Mushin, which is a neighborhood that Fela loved. He sang about it. He set up his club on the edge of it. This is a neighborhood that, you know. Lagos used to be a small town, and then oil money flooded in in the 70s. And all of these people from the countrysides who spoke hundreds of different languages, worshiped different gods, they all come to the city looking for a better life. And neighborhoods like mushing, absolutely explode in size. So we visited this market, Mushine Market. It was one of the most intense, kinetic places I've ever been in my life. Thousands of people in the streets, cars driving on the sidewalk. You had stalls everywhere, people selling everything. Like, one woman had a bucket of crabs that she had just pulled out of the Ogun River. Next to her, someone was selling red peppers that were so red that they kind of buzzed your eyes. Then there was a guy with a tub full of Colgate tooth. There was a guy selling cell phones, onions, an older guy hacking a goat carcass, blood spilling out onto the sidewalk. And the density, I can't even explain the density. It's like if you took one New York City block and injected 5,000 people into it. Meanwhile, there are loudspeakers everywhere, people yelling, trying to get you to come into their shops. We passed one speaker that was blaring Christian hymns. At the same moment, across the street, you could hear the Muslim call to prayer. A few feet down, a third speaker was playing Beyonce. You could hear all three at once. I remember standing in the middle of an intersection, just dizzy. And at one point, I remember looking down and there was this kid, maybe 10 years old, sitting on the curb with his head in his hands.

[David Byrne]

Just.

[Jad Abumrad]

Kind of sitting there bored. And that was my moment. I was like, oh, if you are that kid and this is your everyday to the extent it's boring, like when you grow up, what music are you going to want to hear? What music is going to make sense to you. It's probably going to sound like Fit la. You're gonna want a sound that is aggressive. It's not small, like a little four piece doing its thing, but 30 musicians on stage, all mixing different sounds and cultures, kind of like in the market. Tony Allen playing Yoruba rhythm on the drums, the horns doing modal jazz, guitarists doing a version of James Brown funk. You're gonna try and not only hold all of these things that have filled you up over your life, but you're gonna try and give them a space where they can coexist and have a kind of order like the market. I began to think of Fela's music.

[Michael Veal]

As the encoding of a social order.

[Jad Abumrad]

The social order of Mushin Market into musical sound encoded into sound. That might explain why Michael Veal, when he first encountered Fela in that record shop in Boston, why it felt to him like he'd suddenly stepped through a portal.

[Michael Veal]

One thing that was really a blessing is that going in through the Fela Anukalapo Kuti portal, you're not going in romanticizing Africa, you're going in seeing all of the hardcore problems and contradictions. But it's a beautiful vehicle because underneath all of it, that beautiful groove is just chugging along. So you're getting that, but you're getting this education about all the complexities of contemporary Africa.

[Jad Abumrad]

I guess anytime that you encounter music from another place, it can bring you into not just a new way of sounding, but an entirely new way of being. And this is all happening below the level of consciousness. It's not a thought that you think your body understands this information before your brain does. The music pulls you into movement and while you are dancing, there's something in there that you're responding to, but you don't know what it is yet. And with that, let me make one more leap.

[Brian Eno]

So there's a little bit of noise in this room at the moment, but there won't be when we actually start.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, excellent.

[Brian Eno]

Can you hear me? Okay, I can hear you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Great. Can you hear us? London, late 70s. Around the time when Fela was at the peak of his power. 4,000 miles from Lagos, rock stars David Byrne and Brian Eno step through a Fela shaped portal that turns their musical lives upside down.

[David Byrne]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay.

[David Byrne]

Hi.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hi. How are you doing?

[David Byrne]

I'm doing fine.

[Jad Abumrad]

We'll start with David Byrne. David and I have known each other sort of for a while. We actually are in a book club together.

[David Byrne]

Hi, my name's David Byrne. I'm mostly known As a musician, I'm in my music room in my New York apartment and happy to be here.

[Jad Abumrad]

One of the things I found about David, and I think most people who know him would say this, is that he moves with a certain kind of beautifully buoyant sense of curiosity, as if he's just landed from some other place and he's just happily trying to figure out, what do we have here? He brings a good vibe is what I'm saying. But when I sat down with him and we started talking about his younger self, he told me it hadn't always been that way.

[David Byrne]

Yeah. When I was eventually moved to New York, that was a challenge.

[Jad Abumrad]

You can sort of hear it in his early work, like, if you listen to the lyrics of Psycho Killer, the song that really put him and the Talking Heads on the map. I can't seem to face up through the facts.

[David Byrne]

I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax.

[Jad Abumrad]

You're saying I'm tense, I'm nervous, I can't relax.

[David Byrne]

There you go.

[Jad Abumrad]

Literally, lyrics.

[David Byrne]

That's a lot of other songs from those early records.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[David Byrne]

That are really about angst and kind of alienation, trying to How. Trying to figure out how to fit in.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[David Byrne]

I might not have been entirely aware of that at the time, but in retrospect, I can see that.

[Jad Abumrad]

He says that's just kind of where his head was at at the time. In interviews, he's talked about how he felt all this pressure to lead the band, to write the lyrics on stage. You know, this is a man who would later become known for his dance moves. But at that time, I'd kind of.

[David Byrne]

Stayed away from doing movement on stage. Maybe a little twitching or something, but not nothing. No real dancing.

[Jad Abumrad]

So in 1977, as the band was hitting it big inside that success, David was miserable. But then he meets this guy.

[Brian Eno]

I'm Brian Eno. I'm calling in from London, and I'm a musician. Is that right? Am I a musician? I don't really know.

[Jad Abumrad]

I don't know. That feels too confining a label for you. Brian Eno is. It's just shocking, frankly, how much culture this one man has influenced. He invented ambient music as we know it, so he will always own a piece of my heart. He has produced seminal albums for U2, Laurie Anderson and, in our case, the Talking Heads. He'd met them in 1977.

[Brian Eno]

They had played in London, and I went to see the show and I thought it was dazzling. Afterwards, I met them and we talked a little bit about the possibility of me producing their next record. And I said, well, why don't you come over to my place tomorrow?

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, fortuitously, a few years before this meeting that was about to happen, Brian had wandered into this shop.

[Brian Eno]

There was a record shop off Tottenham Court Road in London called Stearns, and it specialized in importing records for African students. It's quite close to London University there. It was an odd place because I think it did have some hardware in it as well.

[Jad Abumrad]

Apparently it sold toasters, hair dryers, and also records from West Africa.

[Brian Eno]

So they had these racks of current African releases. You couldn't buy them anywhere else in London, or probably in England, as far as I knew. And I think it was late 1973. I was in there and I saw an album called Aphrodisiac. And it had an amazing cover.

[Jad Abumrad]

Red, yellow background, half naked women on the front.

[Brian Eno]

Most interesting for me was that it had a list of musicians on the back and there were lots and lots of players. And I thought, I must hear what that sounds like. You know, if you have five rhythm guitar players, three conga players and 27 singers, I thought, that's gotta be worth hearing. So I bought the record, really, on the basis of the COVID took it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Home, put it on.

[Brian Eno]

And it absolutely blew my mind. I thought, this is really an amazing new form of music. To my ears anyway, this is kind of the future of music.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like, of all the things that you had been listening to right up until that moment where you put on that Fela record, what. What was new about what you were hearing? What is the future? If we could get behind that word.

[Brian Eno]

The sense of duration that you had this big group of people working together and just getting into a zone and staying there for a long time. Moving away from the song form, really, the idea that pop music was about making short, brilliant little diamonds, which is kind of neatly summed up after first chorus, first chorus, middle eight, verse chorus, chorus, chorus. But instead could be do with weaving very big tapestries, a field of sound that sits there for a long time. And you explore it sonically. You kind of enter it and live in it. The duration really is a signal to say, this isn't a song. It's a way of saying, this is a place. It's not a little story, it's a place. And when you start listening to it, you're entering into that place.

[Jad Abumrad]

Fast forward to 1977. Brian meets David Byrne and the Talking Heads. He invites them back to his place to talk about their next album.

[Brian Eno]

And they turned up at My flat following day. And I said, I just want to play you something that I think is really the future of music. And I played them that Aphrodisiac album.

[David Byrne]

When I heard that, I realized, oh, they're doing stuff with the instruments that I'm familiar with, but they're playing them and arranging them in completely different ways that I'd never heard before. I thought, oh, this is really liberating. This is not just feel good music. There's something about this. This generates a completely different feeling in me.

[Brian Eno]

I think it was, in a way, a feeling of we're going to include more in what we do. We're going to sort of break the format that we've quite successfully handled so far.

[Jad Abumrad]

The result of that meeting of Brian Eno playing David Byrne Fellas Aphrodisiac is that the next Talking Heads record sounded completely different. Rather than the usual rock thing where all the musicians are playing the same thing on the beat at the same time, suddenly you had a much bigger sound where you. You have all of these layers upon layers interweaving and inter blocking. If you listen to a song like the Great Curve, it sounds like there's 50 people playing.

[David Byrne]

The magic of the recording studio. Yeah, I mean, we didn't try to get all that big sound with all the brass and everything else, but with a recording studio, you can record with the four piece. Then you go in and kind of play along with yourself. We learn to not try and fill up all the space right away. The parts leave a lot of holes. If you leave a hole, somebody else can put something in that hole. And so nobody's trying to play everything or play all the time. That was kind of a revelatory idea.

[Jad Abumrad]

Say more about that. What was it revealing to you or liberating you from.

[David Byrne]

Well, like when you play a regular pop song on a guitar or something, you're kind of strumming guitar all the time, constantly, and you have the vocal melody going on top. But I realized with hearing music like Vela, you can make music in a different way where you don't play all the time. You're not strumming all the time. You're leaving gaps in what you're doing. You just play like chigga. And then that leaves a little space for somebody else to go chadup. And then you start to get this kind of thing where it's. You sense. You have this sense that there's a whole kind of community of musicians that it takes to make the music, that it's not something that one Person can just, oh, that's interesting. Sit and play guitar, can strum through the whole thing and do it.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's really interesting. Is there something in the communal nature of that polyrhythm that felt important to you personally at that moment?

[David Byrne]

Felt very important to me very personally. I realized that at some point, I realized, oh, this is music where no one part is more important than the others. The whole thing exists by all these cogs in the wheels working together. And if you take out some parts, then it stops working. I thought, oh, this is kind of a model, an acoustic model for a sonic model for a kind of more perfect community where. Where everybody's got their place and they do their part. And when everybody does that, then you get this wonderful thing that emerges. And I also realized it actually feels good when you play that kind of music. It feels very transcendent. You can't. It kind of takes you to a very different place. It really kind of lifts up and you kind of takes you to a different place. So that affected me personally. I was very kind of, you know, a little bit Asperger y introverted person. I thought, this is. This is really different for me. This is a way of working with other people, but musically, socially, might come later. But musically, this is really working and I'm feeling it. This generates a completely different feeling in me. I can't write about that. I can't write those kind of words and sing those kind of things anymore. I have to respond to this music in a very different way than stuff I was doing before.

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, it sounds like you were sort of exhausted by one way of being, and then this opened up a new way of being.

[David Byrne]

Yes. Yeah, it did. It really kind of opened up a whole new personal avenue as well as a musical avenue. In some ways, it's telling you this kind of cooperation amongst people can exist. It's possible. Doesn't mean you're going to get it. It doesn't mean you're going to get it in Lagos, but. Or in New York. But it means that as human beings, this is possible.

[Jad Abumrad]

David Byrne talks about the space and in the music, how as a musician, you leave these gaps, and the gaps are there for others to step into. And when you're all creating that groove together and moving to that groove together, that's when you rise to that new, more perfect vision that he was talking about. And for the 20 or 30 minutes that it's playing, you get to explore what it feels like to be there.

[Brian Eno]

This isn't a song, this is a place. We're just making a space, some kind of a space. You find your place in it. We're not going to lead you through it. It's there, and you. You can look around inside it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thank you to everybody who contributed to this. Michael, Ruby, Ben, Ian, Gofen, Oloakemi, Fei, Fei, the whole team. And thanks to you for listening. If you made it this far. I'm Jad Abumrad signing off.