David Byrne Quotes

I’ve been asking myself: ‚Why put together these things – CDs, albums?‘ The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it’s artistically viable. It’s not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it’s not obvious or even conscious on the artists‘ part.

Probably the reason it’s a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you’re getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you’re going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there’s a kind of bundle.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

I’m concerned that my technical skills have advanced to the point where I can get closer to what I’m aiming for, which is not such a good thing.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

There are plenty of people who are, I think, completely racist who love hip-hop.

If anything, a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home, hardly. It’s really only to be heard when everyone’s out enjoying it.

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

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

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.

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.

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

Yeah, anybody can go in with two turntables and a microphone or a home studio sampler and a little cassette deck or whatever and make records in their bedrooms.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.

Physical contact is a human necessity.

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

From what I’ve heard, Paris did a little bit more prep work as far as making bike lanes and all of that stuff. They really did it properly, which New York is getting to little by little.

I love getting out of my comfort zone.

There’s more good music being made now than ever before.

I resent the implication that I’m less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works.

Yeah, I like to keep myself interested – I’ll kind of throw myself into some area that I don’t completely know or understand, that I’m not adept at, so I’m forced to swim in order to stay afloat. There’s a good feeling that comes from that.

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

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

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

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

I always think the everyday is more relevant than anything too grand because we all have to deal with it.

With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why.

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

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

We live in ugly times.

People hear about stuff from their friends or a magazine or a newspaper.

I’ve got nothing to say most of the time.

I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.

Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce.

You can know or not know how a car runs and still enjoy riding in a car.

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

I’m very much into making lists and breaking things apart into categories.

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

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

Suburban houses and tin sheds are often the objects of ridicule.

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

Do I wear a helmet? Ugh. I do when I’m riding through a precarious part of town, meaning Midtown traffic. But when I’m riding on secure protected lanes or on the paths that run along the Hudson or through Central Park – no, I don’t wear the dreaded helmet then.

I’ve rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.

I don’t like begging money from producers.

Life tends to be an accumulation of a lot of mundane decisions, which often gets ignored.

There’s a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you’re self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn’t so easy in a car, and you can’t cover as much ground walking.

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’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

Most of our lives aren’t that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

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

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.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

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!

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.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.

I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don’t think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me.