Quotes by David Byrne

Recordings arent time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether its morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can get into clubs virtually, sit in concert halls you cant afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you dont 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.

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 theyd be avaliable to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.

The online music magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.

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 arent hearing an expression of a solitary individuals 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?

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 doesnt just placate and pacify.

Music eats its young and gives birth to a new hybrid creature.

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.

It was a uniform that signified that one was a kind of downtown aesthete; not necessarily nihilistic, but a monk in the bohemian order.

Theres always room for Jell-O

I dont care how impossible it seems.

There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told.

A soap opera character on the bar TV says, You killed him, you smothered him with doughnuts! Another character, another scene--she is sitting in a room with a man and an elderly woman--the leas character wonders if shes dead. The man says, No, youre alive, and the other woman hands her a plate of doughnuts.A commercial comes on. A couple are on a date and the womans voice-over articulates interior thoughts of what a wonderful guy her friend has set her up with: Hes so cute, and his IQ is higher than my bank balance . . . but she didnt tell me he has . . . Tourettes syndrome.

Everyone was doing that in their own way, rejecting things and moving on. Its just a part of discovering who you are; its nothing special.

Theres a good chance that you might be inspired by ideas that originate outside of yourself.

One forgets that part of ones performance is ones history—or sometimes the lack of it. Youre playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; theres baggage that gets carried into the venue that we cant see.

I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. newsmagazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press arent biased as well--they certainly are--but living in the United States we are led to believe, and are constantly reminded, that our press is fair and free of bias. After such a short time away, I am shocked at how obviously and blatantly this lie is revealed--there is the reporting that is essentially parroting what the White House press secretary announces; the myriad built-in assumptions that one ceases to register after being somewhere else for a while. The myth of neutrality is an effective blanket for a host of biases.

The radio was shouting at you, pleading with you, and seducing you.

Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects.

But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about what the words say, literally, and nothing more. If done poorly, they can destroy the pleasant ambiguity that constitutes much of the reason we love music. That ambiguity allows listeners to psychologically tailor a song to suit their needs, sensibilities, and situations, but words can limit that, too. There are plenty of beautiful tracks that I can’t listen to because they’ve been “ruined” by bad words — my own and others. In Beyonces song Irreplaceable, she rhymes minute with minute, and I cringe every time I hear it (partly because by that point Im singing along). On my own song Astronaut, I wrap up with the line feel like Im an astronaut, which seems like the dumbest metaphor for alienation ever. Ugh.

I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility.