David Byrne and Fatboy Slim: Here Lies Love

One of the most generous conceits of the musical is that everyone has a song to sing. Hero or villain, characters have a right to take center stage and justify themselves. A collaboration between David Byrne and Fatboy Slim inspired by the rise and fall of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos—and the parallel story of Estrella Cumpas, the woman who helped raise Imelda up from humble beginnings that Cumpas herself never escaped—the musical-in-album-form Here Lives Love attempts to give the devils their due. Over 22 songs, most sung from Imelda’s privilege-blinkered perspective, Byrne and Slim create scenes from the life of a woman who saw herself as a glamorous ambassador who could best aid her country and her powerful husband by becoming the star she always imagined herself to be as an amateur singer and beauty queen. For sonic inspiration, the collaborators draw on Imelda Marcos’ time as a disco habitué in the late ’70s and early ’80s, fitting each dance-floor-friendly track with a vocalist appropriate to the mood they want to create, from Florence And The Machine’s Florence Welch to Cyndi Lauper to Tori Amos.