My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (album)

1981 album by Brian Eno and David Byrne

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is the first collaborative studio album by Brian Eno and David Byrne, released in February 1981. It was Byrne's first album without his band Talking Heads. The album integrates sampled vocals and found sounds, African and Middle Eastern rhythms, and electronic music techniques. It was recorded before Eno and Byrne's work on Talking Heads' 1980 album Remain in Light, but problems clearing samples delayed its release by several months. The album title is derived from Amos Tutuola's 1954 novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. According to Byrne's 2006 liner notes, neither he nor Eno had read the novel, but they felt the title "seemed to encapsulate what this record was about". Pitchfork named it the 21st best album of the 1980s, while Slant Magazine named it the 83rd.

The original package design was created by Peter Saville. The cover image was created by pasting small cutout humanoid shapes onto a monitor and pointing a camera at it to create video feedback, infinitely multiplying the shapes. Byrne said of the process: "Somehow, despite it being very techie, these techniques also seemed analogous to what we were doing on the record. It was funky as well as being techie. Extremely lo tech, actually, and not what you were supposed to do with a TV set."

The official short films accompanying two tracks, "America Is Waiting" and "Mea Culpa", were each made by collage filmmaker Bruce Conner.

According to music journalist Simon Reynolds, many initial reviews of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts dismissed the album as "an eggheads in the soundlab experimental exercise." Village Voice critic Robert Christgau was less impressed, giving it a "C+" and finding the recordings "as cluttered and undistinguished as the MOR fusion and prog rock it brings to the mind's ear," while lacking "the songful sweep of Remain in Light or the austere weirdness of Jon Hassell". In later years, My Life has come to be regarded as a highly influential album, particularly in its use and treatment of sampled source material. AllMusic critic John Bush describes it as a "pioneering work for countless styles connected to electronics, ambience and Third World music". Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright said it "knocked me sideways when I first heard it – full of drum loops, samples and soundscapes. Stuff that we really take for granted now, but which was unheard of in all but the most progressive musical circles at the time The way the sounds were mixed in was so fresh, it was amazing." Hank Shocklee of hip hop production collective the Bomb Squad cited the album as an influence on the Bomb Squad's sample driven production work for the group Public Enemy.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was reissued on 27 March 2006 in the United Kingdom and on 11 April 2006 in the United States, remastered and with seven extra tracks. To mark the reissue, the entire multitracks for two songs – "Help Me Somebody" and "A Secret Life" – were made available to download. Under the Creative Commons license, members of the public are able to download the multitracks and use them for their own remixes.

Region Date Label Format CatalogWorldwide1981SireLP1 6093CD2 6093E. G.481988Sire2 6093Cassette tape4 60931990CD2 453741991LP1 45374Cassette tape4 453741999EMICD0777 7 86473 2 4Sire453742006Nonesuch79894