David Byrne Song Quotes

I don't care how impossible it seems.

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.

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.

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.

A history of nightlife!--what an interesting concept. A history of a people, told not through their daily travails and successive political upheavals, but via the changes in their nightly celebrations and unwindings. History is, in this telling, accompanied by a bottle of Malbec, some fine Argentine steak, tango music, dancing, and gossip. It unfolds through and alongside illicit activities that take place in the multitude of discos, dance parlors, and clubs. Its direction, the way people live, is determined on half-lit streets, in bars, and in smoky late-night restaurants. This history is inscribed in songs, on menus, via half-remembered conversations, love affairs, drunken fights, and years of drug abuse.

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.

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

It's a bit like sympathetic magic in a way: the usual Western presumption that 'primitive' rituals mimic what they desire to achieve--that phallic objects might be believed to increase male potency and playacting rainfall might somehow bring it about. I am suspicious of such obvious connections and I suspect that the connections among things, people, and processes can be equally irrational. 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.

Music as social glue, as a self-empowering change agent, is maybe more profound than how perfectly a specific song is composed or how immaculately tight a band is.

Song references are like emotional shortcuts and social acronyms.

Sometimes it seems as if writing a group of songs is like getting groceries, or doing the laundry—banal things I do more or less on a day-to-day basis. We deal with the issues involved in our mundane activities as they come up,

It was still early, so we took advantage of our time together. We played our favorite songs on her record player and danced and sang along into a hairbrush. When we grew tired of singing, Kat styled my hair in two ponytails, while we looked at teen magazines and swooned over pictures of David Cassidy.

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 aren't hearing an expression of a solitary individual's 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?

I welcome the liberation of music from the prison of melody, rigid structure, and harmony. Why not? But I also listen to music that does adhere to those guidelines. Listening to the Music of the Spheres might be glorious, but I crave a concise song now and then, a narrative or a snapshot more than a whole universe. I can enjoy a movie or read a book in which nothing much happens, but I'm deeply conservative as well—if a song establishes itself within a pop genre, then I listen with certain expectations. I can become bored more easily by a pop song that doesn't play by its own rules than by a contemporary composition that is repetitive and static. I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea—do I have to choose between the two?

and echoes to my singing. More sounds went on—an arc-like melody created using an echo machine, and then a guitar solo at the end that was made by selecting fragments from a number of improvised solos. Finally, I sang the song after jogging in the studio, because for some reason I wanted to sound out of breath. Of course, I was singing the same words and melody as I had been on the earlier, straighter, version of the song, but now to a vastly altered musical track—a fact that also affected how I sang. The song, as it was released,

It seemed as if Muzak had sucked the soul out of the songs, but in fact they had created something entirely new, something close to what Satie imagined: furniture music, music that was clearly a useful and (to their subscribers) functional part of the environment, there to induce calm and tranquility in their shops and offices. Why is it that Satie’s compositions, Brian Eno’s ambient music, or the minimal spaced-out

The pitch of the song of the Scarlet Tanager, for example, is different in the East, where the woods are denser, than it is in the West.V

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 they’d be available to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.

I believe it was the Beatles and other singer-songwriters of the sixties who realized that recording your own songs was far more lucrative than doing record after record covering other people’s songs, as had often been the norm in pop music. This incentivized songwriting,

Sometimes it seems as if writing a group of songs is like getting groceries, or doing the laundry—banal things I do more or less on a day-to-day basis. We deal with the issues involved in our mundane activities as they come up, and songwriting might be viewed similarly, as the response to specific and even pedestrian needs. It might seem that in our day-to-day activities there is no overall plan at work, no consideration of where things are ultimately going. So, too, sometimes, with the process of writing songs. Little decisions are made invisibly every minute, and the cumulative effect, and the often unspoken principles that have guided them, define what appears to be, in retrospect, a conscious plan, with an emotional center and compass. What begins as a random walk often ends up taking you somewhere, somewhere that you later realize was exactly where you wanted to go.

Beauty was a revelation, and these songs were unashamed to be beautiful, which was a difficult thing to accept in the world of downtown musicians and artists. Anything that sounds or looks beautiful would seem to that crowd to be merely pretty, shallow, and therefore deeply suspect—morally suspect, even, I found out. Noise, for them, is deep; beauty shallow.

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! An audience who heard and loved a song on the radio naturally wanted to hear that same song at the club or the concert hall. These two demands seem unfair to me. The performing skills, not to mention the writing needs, the instrumentation, and the acoustic properties for each venue are completely different.

Sometimes sitting at a desk trying to force this doesn’t work. I never have writer’s block, exactly, but sometimes things do slow down. At those times I ask myself if my conscious mind might be thinking too much—and it is exactly at this point that I most want and need surprises and weirdness from the depths. Some techniques help in that regard. For instance, I’ll carry a microrecorder and go jogging on the West Side, recording phrases that match the song’s meter as they occur to me. On the rare occasion that I’m driving a car, I can do the same thing (are there laws against driving and songwriting?). Basically, anything—driving, jogging, swimming, cooking, cycling—that occupies part of the conscious mind and distracts it, works. The idea is to allow the chthonic material the freedom it needs to gurgle up. To distract the gatekeepers. Sometimes just a verse, or even a phrase or two, will resonate and be sufficient, and that’s enough to “unlock” the whole thing. From there on, it becomes more like fill-in-the-blank, conventional puzzle solving.

Looking like a suitable candidate for a David Byrne biopic set around the time of More Songs About Buildings and Food, Colt was not a popular man around campus.

we now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version. What was originally a simulation of a performance—the recording—has supplanted performances, and performances are now considered the simulation.

Pop art from the sixties lingered on as a movement, mutating and becoming more ironic as it drifted further from its origins. Compared to some of the dour work of the conceptualists and minimalists, one felt that at least these artists had a sense of fun. Warhol, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Lichtenstein, and their kin were about embracing, in a peculiar, ironic way, a world with which we were familiar. They accepted that pop culture was the water in which we all swam. I think I can speak for a lot of the musicians in New York at that time and say that we genuinely liked a lot of pop culture, and that we appreciated workmanlike song craft. Talking Heads did covers of 1910 Fruitgum Company and the Troggs, and Patti Smith famously reworked the über-primitive song “Gloria” as well as the soul song “Land of 1,000 Dances.” Of course, our cover tunes were very different from those we would have been expected to play if we had been a bar band that played covers. That would have meant Fleetwood Mac, Rod Stewart, Donny & Marie, Heart, ELO, or Bob Seger. Don’t get me wrong, some of them had some great songs, but they sure weren’t singing about the world as we were experiencing it. The earlier, more primitive pop hits we’d first heard on the radio as suburban children now seemed like diamonds in the rough to us. To cover those songs was to establish a link between one’s earliest experience of pop music and one’s present ambitions—to revive that innocent excitement and meaning.

During the time I was writing the songs for the record that became Grown Backwards, there was love, anger, sadness, and frustration in my life. There were two wars: one begun out of revenge and the second seemingly to consolidate oil interests. Huge amounts of money were expended in what seemed to be obviously futile and counterproductive efforts that many felt would not only bring death to many innocent people, but would end up making us, as a nation, less admired and certainly less safe, both physically and economically, for the foreseeable future. Along with many others, I felt angry—alienated, even—and I did my best to stop the rush into the second conflict, but it was inevitable. It seemed like a misdirected legacy of a nation still stunned, hurt, reeling—a fighter ready to strike out at anything that could be accepted as an enemy. I blogged, and began a campaign that resulted in full-page ads in the New York Times and Rolling Stone urging restraint. You can see an example of one of those ads on the next page.K But it was hopeless. Recent studies have shown that people ignore facts that contradict what they want to believe. Even “smart” people I knew, and many others I respected, were convincing themselves we had to invade. It made me feel like I didn’t know my country and its people, or even my own friends, anymore. How does one react and respond to that? I felt lost and adrift in my home. What kind of music would emerge from living with those feelings? These were not simply abstract political ideas. I felt angry and fucked up every day.

Nonsense! It doesn’t matter whether or not something actually happened to the writer—or to the person interpreting the song. On the contrary, it is the music and the lyrics that trigger the emotions within us, rather than the other way around. We don’t make music—it makes us. Which is maybe the point of this whole book.

Making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge up emotions in performer and listener alike. Some people find this idea repulsive, because it seems to relegate the artist to the level of trickster, manipulator, and deceiver—a kind of self-justifying onanist. They would prefer to see music as an expression of emotion rather than a generator of it, to believe in the artist as someone with something to say. I’m beginning to think of the artist as someone who is adept at making devices that tap into our shared psychological makeup and that trigger the deeply moving parts we have in common. In that sense, the conventional idea of authorship is questionable. Not that I don’t want credit for the songs I’ve written, but what constitutes authorship is maybe not what we would like it to be. This queasiness about rethinking how music works is also connected with the idea of authenticity: the idea that musicians who appear to be “down-home,” or seem to be conveying aspects of their own experience, must therefore be more “real.” It can be disillusioning to find out that the archetypical rock and roll persona is an act, and that none of the “country” folk in Nashville really wear cowboy hats (well, except during their public appearances and photo shoots).

I believe it was the Beatles and other singer-songwriters of the sixties who realized that recording your own songs was far more lucrative than doing record after record covering other people’s songs, as had often been the norm in pop music. This incentivized songwriting, and it was partly due to this insight that there was suddenly an explosion of creativity and innovation in pop music in the sixties. But it also made a few too many musicians feel more or less obliged to consider themselves songwriters. I’m as guilty as many others in feeling that I, or my bandmates, “had” to write every last song on a record, even though covering an underappreciated gem might have been a better choice than recording one of our not-so-stellar writing efforts. However, even not-so-good songs generate income from album sales, as long as there are a couple of hits on there that motivate folks to buy the whole album. The “filler” goes along for the ride and still generates money for the artists and publishers.

I believe it was the Beatles and other singer-songwriters of the sixties who realized that recording your own songs was far more lucrative than doing record after record covering other people’s songs, as had often been the norm in pop music. This incentivized songwriting, and it was partly due to this insight that there was suddenly an explosion of creativity and innovation in pop music in the sixties. But it also made a few too many musicians feel more or less obliged to consider themselves songwriters. I’m as guilty as many others in feeling that I, or my bandmates, “had” to write every last song on a record, even though covering an underappreciated gem might have been a better choice than recording one of our not-so-stellar writing efforts.