David byrne why

What is a rock band? What is a pop song? Why this? Why not that? A better title would have been How Does Music Work? Animals, vehicles, buildings, TV, weather, haircuts… everything was seen with alien eyes. To do that, you need an unusual perspective on the world. The personality that spawned such unique music did not make him easy to share a band with. A few years ago, I interviewed Tina Weymouth and she was still furious about how she thinks Byrne treated the rest of the band.

Does Byrne feel bad about this unresolved tension? I feel bad that the ending was so messy, but that tends to happen. Neither did the others. It was a very messy thing. Was he a hard person to understand back then?

There were certainly periods when I was singularly focused on getting something accomplished. I can imagine I must at times have been a real pain in the ass to deal with. The shows were fine but maybe the experience with me was not always pleasant.

Even if he were to mend that bridge, Byrne would have no interest in a reunion. He sees it as a grand experiment, which a lot of people did at the time. Byrne officially became an American in Does it make him feel any different? But you could say that about people here as well.

One of the modest heroes of Reasons to be Cheerful is Dale Ross, the Republican mayor of Georgetown, Texas, who broke with party dogma and invested in clean energy. I can picture Byrne in City Hall, commissioning studies and introducing practical reforms.

My parents came to this country quite a long time ago, but I got my citizenship, like eight, 10 years ago. Is it the Chinese? To try and understand something is not necessarily to agree with it, but to some extent, I can understand that, and I feel like we have to do better.

We tended to work in a different way each time we worked together. With some of the other projects, there would be much more division of labor. We discovered different ways of collaborating each time. What music moves still moves you the most? Who are your heroes and why? Thank God that some of that can just be forgotten. I started one recently called Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. This book is like one surprise after another. A lot of your fans seem to dwell on your time in Talking Heads.

What advice do you have for moving on? I never get tired of hearing it. Do you still think heaven is a place where nothing ever happens? What advice do you wish you could give your younger self? Mark Summers for Rolling Stone. Newswire Powered by. Lou was a good friend and continued to be, despite that. The drummer felt there was something odd about their frontman from the start.

Frantz had already been playing with future wife Weymouth at that point, imaging a band based on their rhythms. The first signs of Byrne pushing his contributions ahead of anyone else showed in college. He was supposed to be part of a group visual art show but sneaked into the gallery before the opening to rehang his own pieces in a front room, pushing the others to the back. When Frantz questioned Byrne about it, he claimed it was a mistake and that it would be changed, which it later was.

The early version of the band, captured on Talking Heads: 77, stressed what could be described as anti-sensual rhythms, emphasized by the nervous, and distracted, persona of Byrne. The result made them popular enough to inspire a successful tour of England and Europe with the Ramones, who they loved, with the exception of Johnny. Frantz writes that Johnny bullied Weymouth, in between complaining about the cultural sights everyone else wanted to savor.

There was a serious issue, too, with credits. On the first pressing of Fear of Music, in , the writing credits all went to Byrne save for one co-authorship with Eno on I Zimbra. A year later, Byrne was giving the first of many signs that he wanted to ditch the band by recording an album with Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.