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
car
I don't listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don't have a car.
music tend
We tend to mistake music for the physical object.
business combine dramatic drums seem strings warmth
I do seem to like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.
actual affect affected content creativity forces might music profoundly structures technology unrelated utterly
Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.
box felt history rewrite songs
Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren't as strong as some of the others, so you look better.
familiar five key meet might people realise seems six wonder work
I meet young people who know me and are familiar with my stuff. They know the package. They might have cherry-picked five or six key tunes. That's how it seems to work. I sometimes wonder if they realise they are not getting the whole context.
work
Work aside, we come to New York for the possibility of interaction and inspiration.
experience gone hear life married music pay
Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone - a memory.
music sort
Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.
artistic believe breeds buy folks hardship inevitably
Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don't buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down.
finding front life music people ways
People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that's pretty much all you can ask.
exactly identified maybe people pinpoint
Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don't have names for what they are or haven't identified them all. We can't pinpoint exactly what makes each city's people unique yet.
people screaming sure twitching
In retrospect, I can see I couldn't talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching about. Ha! Like, that sure made sense!
bikes clubs east galleries good lower side york
I cycled when I was at high school, then reconnected with bikes in New York in the late '70s. It was a good way of getting around the clubs and galleries of the Lower East Side and Soho.