Quotes from David Byrne

There is water at the bottom of the ocean.

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.

Song references are like emotional shortcuts and social acronyms.

In the words of Enrique Peñalosa, who instituted bike and pedestrian streets and rapid transit in Bogotá when he was mayor, if a bike lane isn't safe for an eight-year-old child, it isn't really a bike lane.

We have been taught not to like things. Finally somebody said it was OK to like things. This was a great relief.

Facts just twist the truth around.

Complete freedom is as much curse as boon; freedom within strict and well-defined confines is, to me, ideal.

music, I would argue, is a part of what makes us human.

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.

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!

It was the best show I'd ever seen; it was so tight and choreographed that it seemed to be from another planet, a planet where everyone was incredible.

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.

Music can get us through difficult patches in our lives by changing not only how we feel about ourselves, but also how we feel about everything outside ourselves.

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.

Still, making music is its own reward.

I would hope very much that the converse of that myth isn't true - that one does not have to be nuts to be creative.

Some say this evanescence helps focus our attention. They claim that we listen more closely when we know we only have one chance, one fleeting moment to grasp something, and as a result our enjoyment is deepened.

The phonograph box in the parlor became a new venue; for many people, it replaced the concert hall or the club.

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

Walter Murch, the sound editor and film director, said, "Music was the main poetic metaphor for that which could not be preserved

the ancient Greeks or Romans could have invented such a device; the technology wasn't beyond them. For all we know, someone at that time actually may have invented something similar and then abandoned it.

performers had to be transparent. Diva behavior was rendered difficult or impractical—the physical situation would have made it look silly. The performers were obliged to interact and mingle with their audience.

Around 1900, according to music writer Alex Ross, classical audiences were no longer allowed to shout, eat, and chat during a performance.2 One was expected to sit immobile and listen with rapt attention. Ross hints that this was a way of keeping the hoi polloi out of the new symphony halls and opera houses.

Watch me work! Watch me work! Watch me work!