“One Fine Day” – David Byrne and Brian Eno
(Words/music: David Byrne and Brian Eno, available on Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, Todo Mundo 2008)

I think I listened to Everything that Happens Will Happen Today once before I read Byrne and Eno’s notes, but after reading that David Byrne wrote “One Fine Day” after reading Dave Eggers’ What is the What, a book I was in the process of reading at the time, I went right back the song.  Byrne’s summarizes the novel quite well in his introductory note to the album:

I’d just finished reading Dave Eggers’s book What is the What?, about a young man named Valentino and his hallucinatory and horrific journey from his destroyed village in Darfur to Atlanta, Georgia and beyond. Valentino’s story was harrowing but also beautiful, uplifting (in a un-corny way), and at times even funny. I think I may have been under the spell of his story when I sat down in front of my microphone.

The result is “One Fine Day.”

I particularly like Byrne’s choice of words here, describing it as being “under the spell of his story,” in part because Valentino Achak Deng’s story is incredible, but also because he sounds enchanted on the song.  The entire album, a creation of what Eno calls “electronic gospel,” sounds warm and inviting, but “One Fine Day” in particular has a sunny radiance to it.  The song, a simple ode to perseverance through trying times, wraps itself in a combination of synthesized and authentic instruments.  Rather than sound jarring or incongruous (as their previous collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts did by design), the two together give the song a dream-like quality – specifically, the type of dream that seems stuck between being awake and asleep.

Byrne’s vocals steal the show – his voice sounds as good as ever, and his choice to add layers of harmonies cultivates the warm and hazy feeling Eno’s music established.  Appropriately, in a song about the perseverance of the human spirit, vocals take the spotlight.  When Eggers and Deng first met, the two spent a lot of time discussing how to tell Deng’s story, ultimately deciding that Eggers would mute his own idiosyncratic voice in favor of writing Deng’s story in his voice, and the novel benefits from his perspective.  It becomes a story of a voice that endured all of life’s extremes, so it’s entirely fitting that Byrne’s tribute celebrates the human voice as well.

More on David Byrne: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm
More on Brian Eno: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm