77: First Week / Last Week ... Carefree

Verses are visions of "Thank You For Sending Me An Angel"; it's a version of a song they reimagine more perfectly as the first track on More Songs About Buildings and Food. The elevator horns don't do much for me here, they sound like a 70's-ism.

Certainly this song is an exemplar of the early-Byrne wordless vocalizations. As time goes on, Byrne will progress from relatively primitive nah-nah's and aah's to percussive whoops and stutters.

There's a subtle difference, here, between the performance of "Don't Worry About The Government," where Byrne assumes the voice of optimistic suburban / corporate exile, and the sort-of-trippy-when-you-think-about-it temporal ejection enacted by moving all of your appointments to last week. It's either a self-help, stress-relief banality or the voice of euphoric schizophrenia speaking from the unmoored platform of no-time. Or perhaps both, perhaps it's being without care, the privilege of Beat-ish dropouts and bourgeois monads (more often than not, they're one and the same), that is as delusional as living completely outside of the Greenwich slipstream.

The 70's horns, then, are a bit more eerie than simple 70's schlock (although there is a zombie-quality to much schlock); they echo like a good dream inside of a nightmare.