POP MUSIC : A Visit to Mr. Byrne’s Neighborhood

“I went to my record company yesterday, and nobody was there,” says David Byrne with a vaguely puzzled look. “Most of the head people had gone to the Grammys.” He pauses, then resumes haltingly. “I guess they must have some acts that are up for stuff.”

It’s the afternoon after the Grammy Awards, and David Byrne is sitting in a Laurel Canyon restaurant and showing just how little attention he pays to contemporary rock ‘n’ roll.

“Rock’s Renaissance Man,” Time magazine called him when it put him on the cover a couple of years ago, when Byrne was simultaneously playing rock music with the Talking Heads, directing the movie “True Stories” and working on more rarefied projects with the likes of composer Philip Glass and avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson.

He’s still playing the field: The new Talking Heads album is just out, Byrne is ready to direct another movie, and he even plans to attend this year’s Academy Awards, where he’s nominated for the score he and Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote for “The Last Emperor” (Sakamoto is interviewed on the next page).

But as he polishes off a cheese-less pizza (leaving the crusts), fidgets constantly and talks in characteristically earnest, measured and halting tones, the 35-year-old Byrne seems less like a trail-blazer than a nervous, slightly offbeat version of Mister Rogers, right down to the gray cardigan sweater he’s wearing with his blue turtleneck, jeans and black cowboy boots.

But Mr. Byrne’s Neighborhood is clearly a bit off the beaten path. Talking Heads’ new album, “Naked,” is a polycultural melange that uses African, European, British and American musicians, some of them folky and others cutting-edge modern.

Powered by the kind of grooves that showed up on the Heads’ 1983 LP “Remain in Light” and ‘84’s “Speaking in Tongues,” the LP is an unsettling look at a discordant environment--and if you’d hardly describe it as a mainstream record, Talking Heads have forced the mainstream to accommodate them since their debut in 1977.

Still, that doesn’t mean Byrne is in tune with the rest of the record industry.

“I think there was a very brief period, a long time ago,” he says, “when I thought, ‘Hey, if I read the trades and we know what’s happening in the industry and keep ourselves a little more attuned to how we fit into things, we can find our niche.’ ”

He stops, considers the idea of David Byrne avidly reading Billboard magazine, and laughs out loud. “But that’s so boring that I kind of lost interest real fast. It never even got to the point where I had a subscription.”

Now, he says, “Sometimes I look at the Top 10, and I don’t know one of those songs. I think, ‘How can I relate? Whom am I talking to with my songs? Whom is my work going out to, when I have no idea what these Top 10 songs are?’ Then I decide that it just doesn’t matter.”

So as Talking Heads release their 10th album, does Byrne have any idea where he and his band fit into the pop-music spectrum?

“Uh . . . ,” he begins, and pauses. “I don’t know exactly how I fit in. By now it seems to me that we’re a name that kind of carries a certain amount of respect. That’s obvious to me by now, and that’s regardless of how many records we sell.

“But we get more respect now, I think, within the industry than from other musicians. It used to be that most of it came from other musicians who were interested in us, and vice versa. And now that we’ve had some measure of success, it’s not as hip anymore.”

He thinks about it in silence for another minute, then gives up with a shrug and a big laugh. “I really don’t know. I don’t wanna worry about it too much.”

In some ways, “Naked” is a look back for Talking Heads.

Although it’s a modern-sounding album, it’s also a record dominated by grooves, where the last two Heads LPs, “Little Creatures” and “True Stories” were albums of songs . And while “Little Creatures” introduced a new, far happier and more optimistic outlook into the lyrics of a man who often viewed his environment with something between trepidation and terror, new songs like “Blind” and “The Facts of Life” look at things far more gloomily: “Now tell me,” Byrne asks in the former song, “what the hell have we become?”

If it’s a look back to the terrors of such Heads albums as “Fear of Music,” the LP also sports an up-to-the-minute mood.

“For a long time it was pretty rare to hear a disparaging word about America, with Reagan and all,” says Byrne, who’s been out of the United States much of the time lately. “But it’s almost as if, with the end of his term in sight, it’s OK to be negative again.

“I think there’s a mood of disillusionment and, you know, a certain amount of helplessness in the same way that there was before the punk groups began. In ‘76, ‘77, around that time, there was a feeling of being disconnected from whatever it is, the machine that makes things run. And culturally, as well, there was a feeling of being disconnected from the culture at large.”

Byrne says he didn’t deliberately set out to capture that feeling in the new lyrics. “I just thought, ‘OK, there’s lots of ways of looking at things. It’s time to look at the other side for a change.’ ”

But Byrne also had a real restriction while writing the words to the album: The music was finished before he constructed the songs’ melodies or lyrics.

Byrne, keyboardist Jerry Harrison, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Franz worked out a series of grooves during rehearsal. Then Byrne structured those musical pieces a little, and they were re-recorded in Paris with additional musicians ranging from African percussionists to British rock guitarist Johnny Marr (from the Smiths) to a punk-folk accordionist (James Fearnley of the Pogues). Finally, Byrne wrote the melodies and lyrics to go with the completed tracks.

The band chose to fully integrate outside musicians into the recording process to make things fresher for the Talking Heads themselves. “Maybe the idea was that it would push us out of any rote way of playing that we might have fallen into . . . . It might just kind of derail us from any rut we might be getting into.”

In recent years the Heads haven’t played together enough to cut any real ruts. The last Talking Heads album, made up of songs from Byrne’s movie “True Stories,” was released in 1986, but recorded the previous year, during sessions for the band’s “Little Creatures” LP.

The band hasn’t toured since 1983. And keyboardist Harrison recently said that the rest of the band wanted to tour this summer, but Byrne vetoed the idea. (Harrison will soon tour with his own band, while Frantz and Weymouth are working on another record for their other group, the Tom-Tom Club.)

So will a Talking Heads tour ever happen again? “Not this year,” says Byrne with a laugh. “It’s possible. Just no plans for it.” Softly, he adds, “It just takes up a lot of time.”

That means no new Talking Heads projects for a while, except for the release of “Storytelling Giant,” a compilation of 10 Talking Heads videos linked by some new footage. Over the last few years, the scarcity of band projects and the admitted hard feelings caused by the media’s emphasis on Byrne caused many onlookers to think the Heads were inexorably drifting apart.

How important are Talking Heads to Byrne?

“I think that for a long time the band hasn’t been this kind of communal activity that one imagines of rock ‘n’ roll bands of the ‘60s and early ‘70s and that kind of thing,” he says. “We don’t go out together all the time, you know. We don’t hang out at each other’s houses. It’s . . . .”

He trails off. “We get together and do Talking Heads stuff, you know? And that part functions pretty smoothly.”

Ideally, Byrne would like to find a balance in which the Heads would only be a part: “A happy medium between movies, or other visual stuff, and music, rather than one leading the other.”

Now that “Naked” is in the stores, his plans are for other projects: He’s been developing another movie in Germany with theater director Robert Wilson. The initial idea is that Wilson and Byrne would take the same story, which Wilson would direct for the stage and Byrne would handle on film. German director Wim Wenders is also lending his support to the project.

Those are hardly mainstream collaborators--but then, Talking Heads has always been the most mainstream, and in most cases the best-received, of David Byrne’s pursuits. “I think that’s by default, kind of,” he says. “Almost everything that I do might be out of the realm of what sells a lot, but I always think that it’s accessible.”

He shrugs. “It’s not meant to be difficult.”

At this, the restaurant manager approaches Byrne and thanks him for “discovering our little restaurant.” Byrne reacts graciously and seems pleased by the attention--and when the manager leaves, he admits that his celebrity “makes me a little more confident in my dealings with strangers, my dealings with people.”

He thinks about it some. “A lotta times, though, people have preconceived ideas that I’m some kind of weirdo. But that’s kinda changing now.”

Is he less of a weirdo than he used to be?

“I think I have less personal tics. My movements, maybe, are less jittery. Stuff like that.”

Byrne stops for a minute and laughs quietly.

“But, I don’t think that means my work is any more normal than it used to be.”