-David Byrne has tapped into something on his new album “Grown Backwards.” What that something is, is hard to pin down.

“Grown Backwards” opens with “Glass, Concrete & Stone,” with rhythms that make one worry Byrne finally has fallen headlong into the world music he has been such a staunch supporter of. As the strings roll in, one realizes that Byrne has stumbled his way into something completely different.

“Grown Backwards” exhibits elements of traditional music from Brazil and the Caribbean, and it mixes that with elements of Western classical music. The resulting album is one of few that can properly be categorized as world music, drawing on music from around the globe to create something that cannot be pinned down to one genre.

On his Web site, www.davidbyrne.com, Byrne describes working on this album backward, starting with melodies and working back toward an underlying song structure. Byrne’s new song-writing technique has his newest album moving toward simple melodies that draw on the sensibilities of Cole Porter, early Jamaican house music and French and Italian opera arias. That may sound like an impossible combination of styles, but Byrne pulls it off. The melodies are catchy, backed by the lush arrangements of Stephen Barber and the Tosca strings.

Byrne’s music rarely disappoints, though his lyrics are a different matter. Often the lyrics on “Grown Backwards” dissolve into overused wordplay; such as on “Empire” where Byrne croons, “From every mountain/ The water and the land/ The world that we’ve created/ By working hand-in-hand.” Despite the somewhat flat lyrics, the album’s themes still ring poignant and bright throughout the album.

With nods to such contemporaries as Lambchop on a cover of “The Man Who Loved Beer,” and such classics as Verdi and Wagner on two of the three opera arias on the album, Byrne continues to create albums that experiment with the boundaries of pop music.