Music From David Byrne Quotes & Sayings

I've made money, and I've been ripped off. I've had creative freedom, and I've been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

As music becomes less of a thing
a cylinder, a cassette, a disc
and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes. — David Byrne

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

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. — David Byrne

I encourage people not to be passive consumers of music and of culture in general. And feeling like, yeah, you can enjoy the products of professionals, but that doesn't mean you don't have to completely give up the reins and give up every connection to music or whatever it happens to be. — David Byrne

Presuming that there is such a thing as "progress" when it comes to music, and that music is "better" now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn't "improve. — David Byrne

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? — David Byrne

Books are made out of books." - Cormac McCarthy Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From David Byrne, How Music Works Mike Monteiro, Design Is a Job Kio Stark, Don't Go Back to School Ian Svenonius, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock 'n' Roll Group Sidney Lumet, Making Movies P.T. Barnum, The Art of Money Getting — Austin Kleon

We don't make music - it makes us. — David Byrne

I've rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

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

Music isn't fragile. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

Some artists and indie musicians see Spotify fairly positively - as a way of getting noticed, of getting your music out there where folks can hear it risk-free. — David Byrne

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

Recordings aren't time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it's morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can "get into" clubs virtually, "sit" in concert halls you can't afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don't 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. — David Byrne

It was rumored that the length of the CD was determined by the duration of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, because that was Norio Ohga's favorite piece of music, and he was the president of Sony at the time. Philips had designed a CD with an 11.5 cm diameter, but Ohga insisted that a disc must be able to hold the entire Beethoven recording. The longest recording of the symphony in Polygram's archive was 74 minutes, so the CD size was increased to 12 cm diameter to accommodate the extra data. — David Byrne

Opera halls, ballets, and large art museums receive more funding
and not all from the government
than do popular art and what might be considered popular music venues ... But there are plenty of innovative musicians ... who have had as much trouble surviving as symphony orchestras and ballet companies ... Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past? ... The 2011 annual operating budget for the New York Metropolitan Opera is $325 million; a big chunk of that, $182 million, came from donations from wealthy patrons. — David Byrne

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 — David Byrne

Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. — David Byrne

In the early days, I might have gotten on stage and begun to sing as a desperate attempt to communicate, but now I found that singing was both a physical and emotional joy. It was sensuous, a pure pleasure, which didn't take away from the emotions being expressed - even if they were melancholic. Music can do that; you can enjoy singing about something sad. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

no one has ever gone to war over music. — David Byrne

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 — David Byrne

You might say that the universe plays the blues. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

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

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone - a memory. — David Byrne

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

Technology has altered the way music sounds, how it's composed and how we experience it. It has also flooded the world with music. The world is awash with (mostly) recorded sounds. We used to have to pay for music or make it ourselves; playing, hearing and experiencing it was exceptional, a rare and special experience. Now hearing it is ubiquitous, and silence is the rarity that we pay for and savor. — David Byrne

There's more good music being made now than ever before. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

Maybe the difference between speech and music isn't all that great. We infer a lot from the tone of someone's voice, so imagine that aspect of speech pushed just a little further. The weird cadences of a Valley girl, for instance, might be viewed as a species of singing. The malls of Sherman Oaks are a setting for a kind of massed choir. — David Byrne

I'm really curious how the private listening - iPods, people listening on their phones - how that might eventual effect music. There'll be a whole genre of music that really works on a kind of one to one headphone or earbud level but doesn't really work when you play it in a room. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing. It's whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day. — David Byrne

Private listening really took off in 1979, with the popularity of the Walkman portable cassette player. Listening to music on a Walkman is a variation of the "sitting very still in a concert hall" experience (there are no acoustic distractions), combined with the virtual space (achieved by adding reverb and echo to the vocals and instruments) that studio recording allows. 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. You, and only you, the audience of one, can hear a million tiny details, even with the compression that MP3 technology adds to recordings. You can hear the singer's breath intake, their fingers on a guitar string. That said, extreme and sudden dynamic changes can be painful on a personal music player. As — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

It's not music you would use to get a girl into bed. If anything, you're going to frighten her off. — David Byrne

He hears everything as music,' said his father, Moses Whitaker. 'The fax machine sounds like an A. The copy machine is a B flat. The jackhammers are making the drum beats that he likes.' When the subway rumbles, Matthew taps his cane on the ground to re-create the noise. He hums along with the city - the fast cars and fast talkers. When asked to describe New York, he stands and pivots a full 360 degrees, pointing his fingers in front of him. 'New York is a circle of sounds,' he says. 'There is music everywhere. Everybody has a smile on their face. It's musical, it's dark and so beautiful. — David Byrne

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that's pretty much all you can ask. — David Byrne

I've changed my music from time to time so I'm hoping that I can completely change my life from time to time, too. Like live in another land, in another place, and just get completely soaked up in another way of being. Could be in this country or another country, somewhere were you can be reborn a number of times not just creatively, but personally as well. I guess I want to go through life as more than one person. — David Byrne