Composition
Eno has also said the album is about "paint a picture of the human trying to survive in an increasingly digital world;" themes that are explored in this song. "Strange Overtones" has been described as "a song about writing a song"—the subject of the song struggles to write innovative music, but is overheard by a neighbor using beats that are "twenty years old." In terms of the genre of music, both Byrne and Eno have called it "electronic Gospel"—the backing tracks are the kind of electronic music for which Eno is known, paired with hopeful and inspiring lyrics from Byrne— this song in particular features an uptempo backing track. Eno had been thinking about Gospel for several years, but couldn't write lyrics to hopeful songs.
Eno considers the album "omething that combines something very human and fallible and personal, with something very electronic and mathematical sometimes." And they tried to "make that picture of the human still trying to survive in an increasingly complicated digital world... It's quite easy to make just digital music and it's quite easy to make just human music, but to try and make a combination is sort of, exciting, I think." Byrne considered his job as lyricist to "bring more humanity" to Eno's instrumentals, which can be "cold and academic."
Read more about this topic: Strange Overtones
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)