“Cordoba” came from Eno reading Hugo’s Latin-American Spanish In Three Months. The book had short, declarative English sentences, the bones of the Spanish phrases the learner was meant to recite: The man was sleeping under the tree. He wrote to me from Cordoba. He put the suitcase under the bed. The elevator stopped between the two floors.

The sentences, just by being arranged in sets, became a mystery novel, Eno thought. Who is the Cordoban? Why does the elevator stop between floors? What’s under the bed? It suggested a scenario to him, of terrorist lovers who don’t know each other’s real identities, plotting to plant a bomb on a bus. Cale gave the lines a slow, haunted phrasing—”the way he sings it is this strange combination—sinister and tender at the same time.” Cale seems startled by details as he sings them, like he’s suddenly recalling pieces of a dream.

Brian Eno / John Cale: Wrong Way Up — Pitchfork

The calls came around 5:30 in the morning. Brian Eno fumbled to the phone and heard an excitable Welsh voice on the other end. "Eno! I've had an idea!" It was London, 1974, and Eno was serving as an "ideas consultancy" for John Cale, who was making his fourth solo album Fear.