My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is the first collaborative studio album by Brian Eno and David Byrne, released in February 1981.[7] 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.[8] 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".[9]
The extensive sampling on the album is considered innovative, though its influence on later sample-based music genres is debated.[10][11]Pitchfork named it the 21st best album of the 1980s,[12] while Slant Magazine named it the 83rd.[13]