David Byrne

Musician

1952-05-14

Scottish-American musician, songwriter, and artist best known as a co-founder of Talking Heads. He later developed an influential solo career spanning music, film, and visual art.

Books by David Byrne

How Music Works
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Bicycle Diaries
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Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences
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Quotes by David Byrne

It was a uniform that signified that one was a kind of downtown aesthete; not necessarily nihilistic, but a monk in the bohemian order.
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Presuming that there is such a thing as progress when it comes to music, and that music is better now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn't improve.
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According to the science writer Philip Ball, when it was pointed out to musicologist Deryck Cookethat Slavic and much Spanish music use minor keys for happy music, he claimed that their liveswere so hard that they didn't really know what happiness was anyway.
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Any kid will tell you that, yes, their music is both an escape and a survival mechanism, and that sometimes the music givesbthem hope and inspiration. It doesn't just placate and pacify.
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Recordings aren't time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it's morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can get into clubs virtually, sit in concert halls you can't afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don't understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context.
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The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they'd be avaliable to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.
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Music written by teams makes the authorship of a piece indistinct. Could it be that when hearing a song written by a team, a listener can sense that they aren't hearing an expression of a solitary individual's pain or joy, but that of a virtual conjoined person? Can we tell that an individual singer might actually represent a collective, that he might have multiple identities? Does that make the sentiments expressed more poetically universal? Dan eliminating some portion of the authorial voice make a piece of music more accessible and the singer more empathetic?
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Music eats its young and gives birth to a new hybrid creature.
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You might say that the universe plays the blues.
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The online music magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.
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In the early days, I might have gotten on stage and begun to sing as a desperate attempt to communicate, but now I found that singing was both a physical and emotional joy. It was sensuous, a pure pleasure, which didn't take away from the emotions being expressed— even if they were melancholic. Music can do that; you can enjoy singing about something sad.
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I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?
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In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they're singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that.
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Complete freedom is as much curse as boon; freedom within strict and well-defined confines is, to me, ideal.
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It's a bit like sympathetic magic in a way: the usual Western presumption that 'primitive' rituals mimic what they desire to achieve--that phallic objects might be believed to increase male potency and playacting rainfall might somehow bring it about. I am suspicious of such obvious connections and I suspect that the connections among things, people, and processes can be equally irrational. I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.
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I wouldn't be surprised if poetry - poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs - is how the world works. The world isn't logical; it's a song.
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I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.
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Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.
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According to the science writer Philip Ball, when it was pointed out to musicologist Deryck Cookethat Slavic and much Spanish music use minor keys for happy music, he claimed that their liveswere so hard that they didn't really know what happiness was anyway.
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Music eats its young and gives birth to a new hybrid creature.
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