David Byrne
David Byrne
David Byrneis a Scottish-born American musician who was the founding member, principal songwriter, and lead singer and guitarist of the American new wave band Talking Heads, active between 1975 and 1991...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth14 May 1952
CityDumbarton, Scotland
real effort neighborhood
A lot of cities are making a real effort, neighborhood by neighborhood, to make themselves into a place where life can be pretty good.
ephemeral cylinders music-is
As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.
technology silence special
Technology has altered the way music sounds, how it’s composed and how we experience it. It has also flooded the world with music. The world is awash with (mostly) recorded sounds. We used to have to pay for music or make it ourselves; playing, hearing and experiencing it was exceptional, a rare and special experience. Now hearing it is ubiquitous, and silence is the rarity that we pay for and savor.
zero talking feelings
By the time Talking Heads were starting, my feeling was to throw out everything and start from scratch onstage; strip it down to as close to zero as you can get and then you can make it yours.
summertime mind
I'm just wearing regular street clothes. Pretty much all the time. In the summertime, or when it gets warm out, shorts and sandals or something like that. Stuff that I don't mind getting a little sweaty.
art ideas looks
...if photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless.
color sky white
I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.
advertisements versions
I'm just an advertisement for a version of myself.
feelings
If I'm feeling that I have an angle or something to say or something where in a way I'm having a conversation with myself, that's immensely pleasurable.
breakup art creative
We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that - the art of it - is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it’s a joy to sing, like the birds do.
care impossible seems
I don't care how impossible it seems.
song writing love-is
I try to write about small things. Paper, animals, a house…love is kind of big. I have written a love song, though. In this film, I sing it to a lamp.
mom community urban
We've gone through the urban renewal cycle in the '60s and '70s that really did a lot of damage to the fabric of urban life - neighborhoods bulldozed and highways pushed through, and all that kind of stuff that really destroyed the kind of social underpinning and the kind of mom and pop stores and all the stuff that makes a community viable.
food dinner leftovers
My favorite time of day is to get up and eat leftovers from dinner, especially spicy food.