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
secret agents astronaut
I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.
writing stuff agendas
I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.
agency government watches
My favorite term for a new kind of performance is "security theater." In this genre, we watch as ritualized inspections and patdowns create the illusion of security. It's a form that has become common since 9/11, and even the government agencies that participate in this activity acknowledge,off the record, that it is indeed a species of theater.
thinking age degrees
With pop music, the format dictates the form to a big degree. Just think of the pop single. It has endured as a form even in the download age because bands conform to a strict format, and work, often very productively, within the parameters.
thinking trying balance
I think sometimes I get carried away, like I'm speaking to an imaginary audience rather than just trying to figure something out for myself. Ideally, I try to balance that - that I'm asking these questions of myself, how does this work, why does this happen, what's going on here.
europe america interesting
I'd been keeping tour diaries, and especially when I go somewhere where I felt the experience might be interesting, like Eastern Europe or South America or whatever, where the whole perception of what I was doing there and stuff that I was seeing and music I was hearing, I could put all that into a diary.
culture stuff depth
Some things, I feel like no, I never could have the depth of experience of their own music and culture - but sometimes if I'm collaborating with somebody, they're interested in me bringing my own stuff into their thing, and sometimes that works.
moving emotional thinking
I'm being probably naïve, but I would like to think that once something moves you and you have an emotional involvement with it, and you see some relevance in it to your own life, then it's a little bit harder, maybe, to look at the people that produced it as being just exotic others that don't have any connection to you or relevance to you.
people needs stuff
There are a lot of people that don't scour websites regularly or read music reviews. They need whatever, the other kinds of stuff, whether it's an appearance on Lettterman or posters or ads. They need to kind of be hit more in the face and be told that there's something new out there.
A lot of that worked itself out in the recording.
song feelings emotion
There's still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don't. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn't communicate anything.
mean feelings records
With a lot of what we take to be true feelings, especially on pop records, we feel them because they're cleverly crafted. And because the words are written by somebody who knows how to craft words and draw on those things and convey those feelings. That doesn't mean they're dishonest. But it also doesn't mean that it's all just pure primitive emotion spilling out.
song feelings records
There's a pervasive feeling that when somebody sings a song and records a song on a record, that it's their true feeling.
artist exotic done
Sometimes the European and North American public like some things to be exotic and kept at arm's length. They don't want sometimes to know that foreign artists are doing something that's at least as relevant as what's being done here.