David Byrne: Grown Backwards : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Reports from the streets of New York, which is always the odds-on spot for a David Byrne sighting, suggest that the former leader of Talking Heads has been working a Mr. Rogers look. But judging from Grown Backwards, his sixth solo album, Byrne is still broadcasting from a neighborhood, or planet, all his own. The songs and opera selections (he performs bits of Bizet and Verdi) are gently loopy: They could coax a bemused smile out of a stone. The Parisian accordion wheeze of "Civilization" gives Byrne the sound of a cosmic cabaret band; the lyric is about being marooned, then empowered, by awkwardness. "Astronaut," on the other hand, is music for a zero-gravity luau, as well as a veiled reference to American isolationism. Taken as a whole, Grown Backwards is a delicate work with a moving subtext: The casually odd music and Byrne's subtle evocations of loneliness work together to suggest that it's great to be your own favorite weirdo, but not paying attention to the rest of the world around you, well, that's really strange. And wrong.

PAT BLASHILL
(RS 947, April 29, 2004)