Byrne’s ideas go way beyond the idea that we can never truly know another person’s mind. If American Utopia has one stomach-punch change-your-life song, it’s probably “Every Day Is A Miracle,” a song that ponders questions that you might’ve never even thought to ask: “Now the chicken imagines a heaven / Full of roosters and plenty of corn / And God is a very old rooster / And eggs are like Jesus, his son.” Byrne sings a lot about animals, and whenever he does, he brings his own dizzy logic to it. It’s full of moments that certainly could fuck you up if you heard them at the right time of your life. As it was, if they did have that moment, it was probably set to Arlo Guthrie or some shit.) American Utopia, Byrne’s new album, doesn’t have any moments that have fucked me up in the same way, but that has a whole lot more to do with me than it does with Byrne. If my parents had a moment like that with my own birth looming, it could’ve been set to something that Byrne wrote. He could’ve been granting moments like that to suddenly expectant parents for 40-plus years. The confusion, the money-stress, the suddenly incomprehensible prospect of my own immediate future - all that melted away in an instant (temporarily, anyway), and this guy reminded me that wonderful and amazing things were about to happen in my life.ĭavid Byrne has a way of doing that, of bursting out with strange insight that punches you in the gut when you may not be expecting it. But in that moment, it was exactly what I needed to hear. But in the confused and denial-plagued headspace where I found myself on that one Tuesday morning, Byrne’s lyrics sounded like precious drops of elliptical wisdom: “Everything that happens will happen today / And nothing has changed, but nothing’s the same.” About halfway into the album, there’s a part where Byrne quietly crows, “Everybody’s happy to be a baby daddy.” I don’t know what he hoped to convey, what he was thinking about when he wrote it. Its songs aren’t about anything they’re simply headblown musings about the world. It’s a beautiful piece of work, a strange and twitchy and gorgeous album. If you’ve never heard Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, you should. And that, in a weird way, is when the entire seismic shift in my life became real. On my way to work that morning, I robotically put Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, David Byrne and Brian Eno’s collaborative album, on my iPod - not for any real special reason, but because it had just come out and because I’d been listening to it a lot around then. It was, after all, a Tuesday morning, and you aren’t supposed to tell anyone about pregnancies until they’re a lot further along. Instead, she pretty much did that for me. I should’ve held my wife’s hand through that moment of transition, supporting her and letting her know that everything was going to be OK. For a longer-than-probably-appropriate time, I convinced myself that it wasn’t real, that the pregnancy test had somehow fucked up. I didn’t know what the fuck to do with this information. One Tuesday morning, just a little under 10 years ago, my wife and I learned that she was pregnant.
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