Quotes from How Music Works

“I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“It can often seem that those in power don't want us to enjoy making things for ourselves - they'd prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“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, quote from How Music Works

“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.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different, and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming those things. And yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves—they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation. This might sound like I believe there is some vast conspiracy at work, which I don’t, but the situation we find ourselves in is effectively the same as if there were one. The way we are taught about music, and the way it’s socially and economically positioned, affect whether it’s integrated (or not) into our lives, and even what kind of music might come into existence in the future. Capitalism tends toward the creation of passive consumers, and in many ways this tendency is counterproductive.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“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, quote from How Music Works

“I wanted to find a reason not to be cynical—to have some faith even when nothing around me seemed to justify it.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“Musicians sort of knew this already—that the emotional center is not the technical center, that funky grooves are not square, and what sounds like a simple beat can either be sensuous or simply a metronomic timekeeper, depending on the player.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“My favorite term for a new kind of performance is "security theater." In this genre, we watch as ritualized inspections and patdowns create the illusion of security. It's a form that has become common since 9/11, and even the government agencies that participate in this activity acknowledge,off the record, that it is indeed a species of theater.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“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, quote from How Music Works

“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.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“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, quote from How Music Works

“Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects. When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that’s when the details take on larger meanings.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“The classical players who think all popular music is simple tend not to hear the nuances involved, so naturally they can’t play very well in that style. Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects. When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that’s when the details take on larger meanings.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“how much of the audience’s fun was sacrificed in the effort to redefine the social parameters of the concert hall—it sounds almost masochistic of the upper crust, curtailing their own liveliness, but I guess they had their priorities. Although the quietest”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“There is always a tradeoff. As music gets disseminated, and distinct regional voices find a way to be more widely heard, certain bands and singers (who might be more creative, or possibly have just been marketed by a bigger company) begin to dominate, and peculiar regional styles—what writer Greil Marcus, echoing Harry Smith, called the “old weird America”—eventually end up getting squashed, neglected, abandoned, and often forgotten. This dissemination/homogenization process runs in all directions simultaneously; it’s not just top-down repression of individuality and peculiarity. A recording by some previously obscure backwoods or southside singer can find its way into the ear of a wide public, and an Elvis, Luiz Gonzaga, Woody Guthrie, or James Brown, can suddenly have a massive audience—what was once a local style suddenly exerts a huge influence. Pop music can be thrown off its axis by some previously unknown and talented rapper from the projects. And then the homogenization process begins again. There’s a natural ebb and flow to these things, and it can be tricky to assign a value judgment based on a particular frozen moment in the never-ending cycle of change.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“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,”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“One forgets that part of one's performance is one's history—or sometimes the lack of it. You're playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there's baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can't see.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“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.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“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,”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“temple and cathedral are attractive because they spatially and acoustically recreate the cave, where early humans first expressed their spiritual yearnings.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“You might say that the universe plays the blues.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“The iPod, like the Walkman cassette player before it,C allows us to listen to our music wherever we want. Previously, recording technology had unlinked music from the concert hall, the café, and the saloon, but now music can always be carried with us. Michael Bull, who has written frequently about the impact of the Walkman and the iPod, points out that we often use these devices to “aestheticize urban space.”4 We carry our own soundtrack with us wherever we go, and the world around us is overlaid with our music. Our whole life becomes a movie, and we can alter the score for it over and over again: one minute it’s a tragedy and the next it’s an action film. Energetic, dreamy, or ominous and dark: everyone has their own private movie going on in their heads, and no two are the same. That said, the twentieth-century philosopher Theodor Adorno, ever the complainer, called this situation “accompanied solitude,” a situation where we might be alone, but we have the”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“Mythologist Joseph Campbell, however, thought that the temple and cathedral are attractive because they spatially and acoustically recreate the cave, where early humans first expressed their spiritual yearnings.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

“I had grown up on Folkway'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 recordings in any genre. You were made to feel, for example, that this music wasn't a ghostly remnant form some lost culture, soon to be relegated to the almost forgotten past. It was vital, and it was happening right now. To us there was strange beauty there, deep passion, and the compositions often operated by rules and structures that were radically different from what we were used to. As a result, our limited ideas of what constituted music were exploded forever. These recordings opened up myriad ways that music could be made and organized. There were many musical universes out there, and we had been blinkered by confining ourselves to only one.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works

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