[On More Songs about Buildings and Food], Byrne's lyrics obsessively juxtapose the irreconcilable, nonnegotiable demands of the head and the heart….

If, in one song, Byrne chides the girls for ignoring the boys …, in most of the others, Byrne himself seems frantically to be staving off amorous involvement: "I've got to get to work now" (the traditional male equivalent of "Not tonight, honey—I've got a headache"). Indeed, the word work recurs throughout the record as the singer both pushes and parodies the Protestant ethic…. Love wreaks havoc on the rational, workaday world, and David Byrne's comic cold shoulder recalls the more strenuous resistance of Joni Mitchell, so many of whose songs have expressed a similar fear that love will deflect her artistic career.

Love and work, of course, is what Freud said all of us need, but on More Songs about Buildings and Food, Byrne appears able...