Bel canto opera isn't the first musical genre one associates with former Talking Heads front man David Byrne.

It probably ranks somewhere down near polka and zydeco on a list of influences that have worked their way into Byrne's music, far below funk, high life, samba and the various Brazilian styles that he helped introduce to U.S. audiences through the popular compilations on his Luaka Bop label.

But Byrne's latest album, ``Grown Backwards,'' his debut for the Nonesuch label, doesn't merely feature the famously twitchy singer acquitting himself respectably while belting out two arias, by Bizet and Verdi. According to Byrne, ``Un dì felice, eterea,'' from ``La Traviata'' opened the door to a new approach to songwriting for him, an exploration of melody that has produced his most rewarding album yet as a solo artist.

``It was the Verdi aria that I recorded before most of the other stuff on the record,'' Byrne says from a hotel in Spokane, Wash., in the midst of a North American tour that brings him to Saratoga's Mountain Winery on Tuesday and Wednesday and to Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall on Aug. 27.

``I think that became a key to how I could emotionally approach the material I was going to write,'' Byrne says.

Dating to his years with Talking Heads, Byrne has looked to rhythmic motifs for songwriting inspiration, building tunes from a groove. But he created his latest batch of songs by capturing spontaneous snippets of melody while wandering around Glasgow, London and New York, humming wordlessly into a micro-cassette recorder. Later, he set about transcribing and weaving together the melodic fragments, which he has called ``coded messages to myself,'' while staying with friends in Tunisia.

Though Byrne has written some of the more lyrical songs in contemporary pop music -- Talking Heads' ``Heaven'' and ``This Must Be the Place'' -- he doesn't generally trust the melodic impulse.

``This isn't an emotional stance as much as an intellectual argument, one that implicates melody for the way it's tended to hog the spotlight in Western music,'' says Byrne, who was born in Dumbarton, Scotland.

``I tend to think that, when melody takes precedence, it's kind of a bully. It also represents the legacy of Western European music, which is very hierarchical. The melody takes precedence, and then there's other stuff that supports that.''

Byrne takes the argument several steps further, casting melody as a reflection of repressive social structures, like patriarchy. ``I've always tried to keep melody at arm's length,'' Byrne says, ``but at this point it just seemed like maybe I'm ready to deal with it.''

Of course, Byrne knows that societies in which rhythm is privileged aren't necessarily egalitarian utopias. But he has always reveled in the liberating power of syncopation.

``I haven't abandoned any of that,'' he says. ``I think I also realized that singing a beautiful melody can also feel good, in a slightly different way. It can be a slightly different kind of emotional or psychological catharsis. I enjoy that in other people's songs. I thought maybe I can bring that to some of my own stuff.''

Subversive bearing

Over the years, Byrne has honed his anthropologist sensibility, as if he were a perpetual observer of the strange folk ways of the people he happens to live among. That beatific, chilly awkwardness lent his work with Talking Heads its subversive charge, and it has been a thread running through his creative life outside of music, as a photographer, film director, author and visual artist (it's hard not to smile when reading the title of his recent book ``Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information,'' which compiles his recent PowerPoint performance art pieces). He has also been immersed in the glories of his musical past, producing the two-disc box set ``The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads'' (Rhino Records), an expanded version of the 1982 live double album that captured the band's raw but precisely applied power.

On songs such as ``Glass, Concrete & Stone,'' ``Civilization'' and ``Astronaut'' (which features Pamelia Kurstin on theramin), Byrne is at his best, combining his wide-eyed look at contemporary life with his oddly affecting crooning. In embracing his inner songbird, Byrne gave free rein to his gifts as a tunesmith.

Working with arranger Stephen Barber and the Austin-based Tosca Strings, a sextet that's accompanying him on this tour, Byrne is both exploring material from the Heads and delivering his lively, often terrifically catchy new songs.

``Grown Backwards'' is particularly successful in the way Byrne has created highly textured arrangements, the culmination of years of experimenting with strings. Avoiding the numerous pop-music cliches that threaten diabetics whenever strings appear, Byrne and Barber incorporate the group's three violins, two cellos and viola into the band, which also features Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco, Byrne's longtime collaborator; bassist Paul Frazier; and, on the tour, drummer Graham Hawthorne.

``I realized there's an incredible variety of things that strings can do, like any other instrument,'' Byrne says. ``They can play things that really rock out or things that are incredibly heart-wrenching. They can work with percussion. They can take the place of guitars and keyboards, instead of being this wash of syrup that gets poured on top of them.''

Brazilian affinity

Much of the album's rhythmic sinew comes from Refosco, who effortlessly distills many of the Afro-Brazilian grooves that have found their way into Byrne's music in recent years. In its early phase, his fascination with Brazilian pop music played itself out through his Luaka Bop Brazil Classics series exploring Tropicália, samba, forro and the music of Os Mutantes and Tom Zé.

Lately Byrne's connection to Brazilian music has grown much more intimate. Last April he appeared at Carnegie Hall as a guest of legendary Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso. And his latest tour concludes Sept. 21 at Town Hall in New York City, where he's performing at a benefit concert with Gilberto Gil, minister of culture in the government of Brazil's Luiz Inácio ``Lula'' da Silva.

``Naturally, it starts to filter into my own stuff,'' Byrne says. ``Maybe at first, it filters in though pure imitation and then gradually in less obvious ways, particularly the rhythms. Now it's just part of my musical grammar.''

While his feelings about Brazilian music are unconflicted, Byrne describes his Talking Heads repertoire in decidedly ambivalent terms. (``It's kind of a confused relationship,'' he says.)

Both as a matter of pride and as a means of pleasing fans, he includes more than half a dozen songs from the Heads in each show, though he doesn't hesitate to rework them. The point isn't to make them unrecognizable, à la Bob Dylan's frequent treatment of his hits. Rather, Byrne interprets the old tunes through the lens of his latest project.

``I'm aware that some of them are real crowd-pleasers, as they should be,'' Byrne says. ``But I'm also aware that, if I do too many of them, I become an oldies act. I think people expect me to mix things up and do something new. Now we have a couple of Talking Heads songs that have string arrangements. `Psycho Killer' sounds more scary with strings than it ever did with a band.''

David Byrne

Where: Mountain Winery, 14831 Pierce Road, Saratoga

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesday

Tickets: $35.25-$55.25

Call: (408) 998-8497 or check www.ticketmaster.com

Also: 8 p.m. Aug. 27, Zellerbach Hall, University of California-Berkeley, $45, (408) 998-8497, www.ticketmaster.com