Quotes from David Byrne

The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they'd be available to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.

The pitch of the song of the Scarlet Tanager, for example, is different in the East, where the woods are denser, than it is in the West.V

Yale, pointed out that once you let yourself see things this way, lots of things become "musical scores"—although they might never have been intended to be played.

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

life is far more interesting than it needs to be, because the forces that guide it are not merely practical.

Dissanayake writes that art that engages the mind and hands, that is not just passive connoisseurship, can act as an antidote, for our contentious and alienated relationship to our own societies.

The dead guys won't write more symphonies.

with jazz and folk musicians, everything was expected to be thrown into the crucible of a gig to see if it sank, floated, or maybe even flew.

Much like the rat that presses the lever for more cocaine and forgets to eat, we'll crave music that pushes our buttons but has no sustenance.

God laughs at people like us.

Psychology, the talking cure, linguistics, and semantics - they're all like dogs poking around and sniffing their own vomit. There might be some gems in there, you never know. For certain you will at the very least know what you had for lunch. And you can ascertain what not to eat again.

Powerpoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it's a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good.

You can't touch music—it exists only at the moment it is being apprehended—and yet it can profoundly alter how we view the world and our place in it.

The technology is useful and convenient, but it has, in the end, reduced its own value and increased the value of the things it has never been able to capture or reproduce.

Making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge up emotions in performer and listener alike.

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.

we now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version. What was originally a simulation of a performance—the recording—has supplanted performances, and performances are now considered the simulation.

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.

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.

where music is heard can determine the sort of music created by the artists who perform there.

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.

oh, it's a penis. They're all masturbating. At high speed, it seems.

At that time, American radio was a cauldron if impassioned voices—live preachers, talk-show hosts, and salesmen. The radio was shouting at you, pleading with you, and seducing you.

The radio was shouting at you, pleading with you, and seducing you.