David Byrne Quotes

People probably heard a greater quantity of music, and a greater variety, on these devices than they would ever hear in person in their lifetimes.

I've rarely kept my distance from kind of - I don't know if we can call it politics, but kind of, civic engagement and that kind of thing, except I tended to think, 'Well, do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.'

I don't like begging money from producers.

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 Beyonce's song "Irreplaceable," she rhymes "minute" with "minute," and I cringe every time I hear it (partly because by that point I'm singing along). On my own song "Astronaut," I wrap up with the line "feel like I'm an astronaut," which seems like the dumbest metaphor for alienation ever. Ugh.

Some of you people just about missed it

I'm afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn't fit that will become unnecessary.

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.

I'd like to be known for more than being the guy in the big suit.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

When you fall in love, you feel like a missing piece of a puzzle that's been found.

All that interconnectedness that facilitated much of the explosion of megawealth over the last decade also facilitated the interpenetration of everything, so no one or no building is truly isolated and 'safe' anymore. Safety is in getting along. (p.261)

As if it were the equal of Western classical or art music. The recordings were given respect, thoughtful presentation, and technical attention that was all too rare for non-Western music. I had grown up on Folkways's Nonesuch field recordings and the stuff Lomax had done for the Library of Congress, but the production values on the Ocora releases were on a whole other level. Eno and I realized that music from elsewhere didn't need to sound distant, scratchy, or "primitive." These recordings were as well produced as any contemporary recording in any genre. You were made to feel, for example, that this music wasn't a ghostly remnant from some lost culture, soon

I think that if they want people to listen to ten or twelve songs, they have to give the listener a reason to listen to ten or twelve songs or to buy ten or twelve and listen to the whole thing instead of just pulling one or two for their iPod or their computer.

People in Latin America ... love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You're not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.

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

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

The performing musician was now expected to write and create for two very different spaces: the live venue, and the device that could play a recording or receive a transmission. Socially and acoustically, these spaces were worlds apart. But the compositions were expected to be the same!

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.

It's like 60 Minutes on acid.

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

Television sounded really different than the Ramones sounded really different than us sounded really different than Blondie sounded really different than the Sex Pistols.

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.

The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove.

The most common music that you hear anywhere in the world now basically has its roots in that union that happened in the last century, or in the century before that. That kind of music that's groove or beat oriented just didn't exist in lots of cultures before that.

There's a good chance that you might be inspired by ideas that originate outside of yourself.

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.

It seemed [there are] musical nodes on the planet where cultures meet and mix, sometimes as a result of unfortunate circumstances, like slavery or something else, in places like New Orleans and Havana and Brazil. And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that.

Something about music urges us to engage with its larger context, beyond the piece of plastic it came on-it seems to be part of our genetic makeup that we can be so deeply moved by this art form. Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing.

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

I don't listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don't have a car.

In acoustic culture, the world, like sound, is all around you, and comes at you from all directions at once. It is multilayered and nonhierarchical; it has no center or focal point.

There's a great temptation to clean everything up and make everything more perfect. You have to know when to stop and stop doing it, or you might end up with something that sounds metronomic.

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

Where music is heard can determine the sort of music created by the artists who perform there.

I don't care how impossible it seems.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that's beyond the practicality of what I can do.

Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily.

For years we have been taught not to like things. Finally somebody said it was OK to like things. This was a great relief. It was getting hard to go around not liking everything.

Patience is a virtue but I don't have the time.

We are like the birds. We adapt. We sing.

As everything becomes digitized, there's the idea that things that can't be digitized become more valuable.

Facts just twist the truth around.

Performing is a thing in itself, a distinct skill, different from making recordings. And for those who can do it, it's a way to make a living.

According to the science writer Philip Ball, when it was pointed out to musicologist Deryck Cooke
that Slavic and much Spanish music use minor keys for happy music, he claimed that their lives
were so hard that they didn't really know what happiness was anyway.

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.

This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around.

I'm guarded; I don't talk much.

The very best [infographics] engender and facilitate an insight by visual means - allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece - when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there's an instant "Aha!" ...

Music, I would argue, is a part of what makes us human.

I don't think I have grand visions that I will never achieve.

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

Body odor is the window to the soul.

The arts don't exist in isolation.

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 she's dead. The man says, No, you're alive," and the other woman hands her a plate of doughnuts.
A commercial comes on. A couple are on a date and the woman's voice-over articulates interior thoughts of what a wonderful guy her friend has set her up with: "He's so cute, and his IQ is higher than my bank balance . . . but she didn't tell me he has . . . Tourette's syndrome.

What's been missing from digital music sales has been the possibility of added depth. In a printed package one can only include so many images and so much text - for example - but digitally it's wide open. For the most part at the moment we get less information for slightly less money - though we could be getting a lot more.

Yale, pointed out that once you let yourself see things this way, lots of things become "musical scores" - although they might never have been intended to be played.

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.

I came to New York to be a fine artist - that was my ambition.

It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. You can make a record on a laptop.

I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.

Crime is a job. Sex is a job. Growing up is a job. School is a job. Going to parties is a job. Religion is a job. Being creative is a job

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

I can't deny that label-support gave me a leg up - though not every successful artist needs it.

Everything's intentional. It's just filling in the dots.

The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

You go to a festival, you know you're not going to play all new material at a festival. The audience is not there for that. I've made that mistake, but you find out pretty quickly.

My personal feeling is that human beings have this incredible capacity for denial.

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.

Is giving in to the photographer's presumably natural impulse to compose and light well sometimes okay and not okay other times?

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.

People are renovating places and opening ambitious new venues. That's one thing that music does. It gets people out of their houses, and gets them hanging out together.

Work aside, we come to New York for the possibility of interaction and inspiration.

Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community.

My take is that the kind of complexity which says we can always generate complexity from simple interactions following for example rules.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they're going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It's just a given law.

I still feel like if I can get a song to work with, say, a basic beat, a rhythm, some chord changes, and a melody, a vocal melody - if it works with that, then I feel it's written and there's something there.

With headphones on, you can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety, and the lack of uncontrollable reverb inherent in hearing music in a live room means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact; it doesn't get blurred or turned into sonic mush as it often does in a concert hall.

A little touch of chaos and danger makes a city sexy.

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.

What factors external to the music itself can make it resonate for us. Is there a bar near the stage? Can you put it in your pocket? Do girls like it? Is it affordable?

I'm no Lance Armstrong, but I do use a bike to get from place to place in Manhattan, a little bit of Brooklyn.

A lot of that worked itself out in the recording.

I think sometimes - not always - I write songs that are accessible.

One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you're allowed to fail.

I love getting out of my comfort zone.

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

It was the best show I'd ever seen; it was so tight and choreographed that it seemed to be from another planet, a planet where everyone was incredible.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one's own town.

Well, Marx is having a comeback. I hear him mentioned a lot in terms of the global financial situation and the general sense of injustice out there. A lot of economic experts in America refer to him without actually using the M word, but he's around.

Cycling is a joy and faster than many other modes of transport, depending on the time of day. It clears the head.

I'm proud of 'Stop Making Sense,' but it's a little bit of an albatross; I can't compete with it, but I can't ignore it either.

Metal buildings are the dream that Modern Architects had at the beginning of this century. It has finally come true, but they themselves don't realize it. That's because it doesn't take an Architect to build a metal building. You just order them out of a catalog - comes with a bunch of guys who put it together in a couple of days, maybe a week. And there you go - you're all set to go into business - just slap a sign out front.

With the advent of recorded music in 1878, the nature of the places in which music was heard changed.

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.

I'd argue that contemporary hip-hop is written (or at least the music is) to be heard in cars with systems like the one below. The massive volume seems to be more about sharing your music with everyone, gratis!