David Byrne and St Vincent (AKA "Annie") have collaborated on a new album called "Love This Giant," which will come out in Sept. If you pre-order now ($9 for electronic delivery, $11 for electronic + CD), you get a bonus preview track called "Weekend in the Dust," which I am listening to at this moment, and I can barely type for the monumental awesome funkiness thereof. Byrne writes:
On “Weekend in the Dust”, I came up with some brass riffs and swells that sounded pretty funky to me. I then sent those to Annie and she wrote a cool vocal melody over it (later she wrote words too). We both arranged her vocal and other elements of the track a bit further—still working with horn samples temporarily. Finally, we passed this one to baritone sax monster Lenny Pickett, ex Tower Of Power and current Borneo Horns and SNL bandleader, for arranging. I'd previously worked with Lenny on a Talking Heads track (“Blind”) so I know he is really good at convoluted and funky—and that describes this track pretty well. We recorded the whole band playing it in the studio in Hoboken, which I arrived at one morning in March via bicycle and ferry. Nice!
I'm interviewing Byrne on stage at Toronto's International Festival of Authors at the Harbourfront centre in September, as part of the tour for his forthcoming book How Music Works and my forthcoming books Rapture of the Nerds (with @cstross) and Pirate Cinema. I got an advance copy of it last week and I've been stealing all the moments I can find to read it.
