Byrne, David
David Byrne
Singer, songwriter, composer, filmmaker
More than almost any other popular musician, the multitalented David Byrne is at home in many worlds: rock music, “art” music, ballet, film music, photography, and filmmaking. His solo musical work, begun while he was still guitarist and lead vocalist for Talking Heads—a defunct new wave band formed in New York City in 1974—reflects his wide-ranging interests. Byrne has also experimented extensively with world beat music, implementing African and Latin rhythms. The Talking Heads albums of the 1980s—including Remain in Light, Naked, and Speaking in Tongues —show a substantial blending of international styles. By the end of his time with the band, Byrne’s work with them and on his own was deeply influenced by world beat, featured cerebral, angst-ridden lyrics, and was heralded in the music world as eclectic and original.
Acknowledged as an intellectual rock star, Byrne, as frontman of Talking Heads, was an innovator in the emerging new wave rock scene of the late 1970s. A native of Scotland, Byrne immigrated to the United States and during his teens and early twenties played in small rock bands. Seeking the company of art students, he enrolled in several classes at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he eventually met up with his future Talking Heads bandmates.
“[I was] fascinated by conceptual art,” Byrne told Jerome Davis, author of Talking Heads. “In particular, there was some that just used language. They’d just write a statement on the wall.” He called such work “the ultimate in refining and eliminating all the superfluous stuff in art and being left with nothing but the idea.” Friends grew familiar with the young Byrne’s quirky concepts, including his song “Psycho Killer,” a notorious ballad that later became one of the Heads’ first recordings.
For the Heads, whose members included Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison, Byrne wrote songs in praise of gainful employment, buildings, and television, but his words and his voice conveyed such underlying hysteria that the result verged on satire. But if Byrne criticized society, he did so indirectly, for his lyrics were characterized by their strange wording and absurdist humor. As Christopher Connelly observed in Rolling Stone, the songwriter “took cultural cliches—on everything from true love to civic pride—out of their customary contexts” and mixed them into dreamlike, ominous new statements, “whose odd juxtapositions and things left unspoken were rich with wit and insight.”
For the Record…
Born May 14, 1952, in Dumbarton, Scotland; immigrated to United States, 1958; British citizen; son of Thomas (an electrical engineer) and Emily Anderson (a teacher and activist; maiden name, Brown) Byrne; married Adelle Lutz (a designer and actress), 1987; children: Malu Abeni Valentine. Education: Attended Rhode Island School of Design, 1970-71, and Maryland Institute, College of Art, 1971-72.
Vocalist and guitarist with Talking Heads, 1974-88; solo artist, 1981—; conceived stage performance for film Stop Making Sense, 1984; co-wrote and directed film True Stories, 1986; producer of rock videos and recordings; actor appearing in television programs, including Surviving a Family Tree, c. 1985; formed own label, Luaka Bop, at Warner Bros. Records; illustrator, including art for Talking Heads albums and cover of Time, October 27, 1986; composer; photographer. Charter member of the Texas Accordion Association, 1987—.
Member: Musicians Union, Screen Actors Guild.
Selected awards: Film Critics Award for best documentary, for Stop Making Sense, and Video Vanguard Award from MTV, both 1985; Academy Award, Grammy Award, Golden Globe Award, and Hollywood Foreign Press Association Award, all for best original score, 1987, for The Last Emperor.
Addresses: Agent —Steve Davis, William Morris Agency, Inc., 1350 Sixth Ave., New York, NY 10019. Record company —Luaka Bop/Sire, 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10019.
Popular Among the Avant-Garde
Byrne’s first major solo endeavor—which appeared after the release of four Talking Heads albums by Sire Records—was a collaboration with longtime Talking Heads producer Brian Eno on a 1981 album entitled My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Demonstrating Byrne’s growing interest in music of other cultures, the LP includes rhythms of Africa and the Middle East. Some critics found fault with such cross-cultural musical borrowings. John Pareles of Rolling Stone, for example, wrote that My Life in the Bush of Ghosts “raises stubborn questions about context, manipulation and cultural imperialism.”
Also in the early 1980s, Byrne was becoming a popular figure among New York’s avant-garde artists, sometimes joining them on projects outside the band. He provided music and lyrics for The Catherine Wheel, a dance production by choreographer Twyla Tharp, and later wrote music and texts for The Knee Plays, interludes in an epic opera by experimental dramatist Robert Wilson, with whom he later wrote the 1988 stage performance piece The Forest.
Byrne’s intellectual approach to popular music and his desire to do more than play with sounds comes up again and again in interviews. When asked by Rolling Stone why he was interested in African music, Byrne stated that at first he just liked the music. Then, “later on, when I started breaking the beats down and putting them back together again, I saw how African and Afro-American songs were put together in similar ways. I saw there were social parallels to the music and a kind of sensibility and philosophy and even metaphysics that’s inherent in the way the music’s constructed and the attitude in which it’s played.”
Byrne’s interest in African and Caribbean music has led him to a study of those areas’ religions, but he never loses sight of the music. He commented in Rolling Stone, “Artistically, you notice that this is the route where a lot of music and sensibility and attitude finds its way into popular music and popular culture. So it’s a pretty natural thing to want to find out where all this came from: Let’s get back to whatever it is.”
Solo Work
Since his interest in African music, Byrne’s world musical tastes have moved closer to home: On 1989’s Rei Momo he collaborated with Latin musicians and songwriters. Critics seemed to like the music, but only after they imagined Byrne out of it. A Down Beat correspondent wrote that Byrne just didn’t understand the musical style he was using and that his effort was merely a pastiche. In a review that was even less forgiving, a Melody Maker critic accused Byrne of voyeurism on another culture and its music, of hiring authenticity rather than being true to himself. Byrne finds such criticism difficult to understand; he remarked in Musician, “Musically, you can’t really ask musicians to sit still and not try to work with music that they enjoy. Most of the time, I work with the people, I’m friends with them. It’s not like I just hear something on a record and go, oh, I’ll cop that. But I don’t see the press jumping all over Rod Stewart ‘cause he stole Jorge Ben’s song for ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’”
Byrne’s interest in Latin music wasn’t a passing fad, or at least it hasn’t passed yet. He compiled some albums featuring Brazilian musicians and seems to want to be a participant in the constant definition and redefinition, appropriation and re-appropriation of African music that Latin musicians have been engaged in for centuries. Byrne’s infatuation for Latin music eventually shifted to the rhythms of Cuba, and he has released two anthologies of Cuban music: Cuba Classics and Cuba Classics 2: Dancing With the Enemy.
Byrne’s second solo album, Uh-Oh, released in 1992 by Luaka Bop/Sire Records, features some of the Latin musicians who appeared on Rei Momo and again displays Byrne’s wide musical interests as well as his themes of alienation and social injustice. Well received by critics, Uh-Oh is a collection of mostly up-tempo songs with an undercurrent of sarcasm and irony. “Twistin in the Wind,” for example, “is a chipper diatribe about dirty dealings in Washington, D.C., and Everytown, U.S.A.,” according to Josef Woodard in Rolling Stone. Rating the record an A-, Entertainment Weekly’s Stephanie Zacharek noted that “Byrne integrates musical genres with still more confidence. … And nearly every arrangement has been burnished to a luster.”
Music for Plays and Films
Byrne’s orchestral music to The Forest, a theatrical piece by the avant-garde performance artist Robert Wilson, continues many of Byrne’s earlier concerns with identity and disaffection. In the liner notes accompanying the 1991 album, Byrne wrote that “The Forest is less a piece than a process. A process of discovering what it is we are made of. What kinds of ideas, what prejudices, what propaganda fills us up, what we think is beautiful and what we think is ugly, what we consider Nature and what we think is God.” The Forest, like most of Byrne’s work, tackles the musician’s interest in life’s larger questions as well as the enduring aspects of the industrial age. Set in the mid-1880s, the piece features probably the most classical of all musical styles Byrne has ever employed.
Byrne has also composed music for films, most notably for True Stories of 1986—a motion picture he also co-authored and directed—and 1987’s The Last Emperor —a Stephen Spielberg creation. Despite the fact that The Last Emperor score, co-written with Rhuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su, garnered Byrne an Academy Award, it is his least discussed endeavor. True Stories, on the other hand, was Byrne’s project and displayed many of his familiar concerns—about truth, identity, and post-modern alienation. The film and music were criticized by some as voyeuristic and exploitative, while others praised their quirkiness and humor.
Byrne’s artistic activities are myriad, as displayed by his musical interests. His albums offer bold amalgamations of African, Latin, Middle Eastern, rock, and classical music, and he indicated in the early 1990s that he is planning to release LPs featuring Japanese and Indian music. Maybe Byrne’s goal is not, as former bandmate Tina Weymouth once said of the Talking Heads, to change the face of music; his aim is perhaps to change the face of contemporary American culture.
Selected writings
(With Robert Wilson) The Knee Plays (play comprised of interludes in Wilson’s epic opera The CIVIL WarS), 1984.
The Tourist Way of Knowledge (performance art), 1985.
(With Beth Henley and Stephen Tobolowsky) True Stories (screenplay), released by Warner Bros., 1986.
(With others) What the Songs Look Like: The Illustrated Talking Heads (lyrics), illustrations by Byrne and others, Harper, 1987.
Stay up Late (lyrics; for young people), illustrations by Maria Kalman, Viking, 1987.
(With Robert Wilson) The Forest (stage performance), 1988.
Selected discography
Solo albums
(With Brian Eno) My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Sire, 1981.
The Complete Score From “The Catherine Wheel,” Sire, 1982.
Songs From the Broadway Production of “The Catherine Wheel,” Sire, 1982.
Music for “The Knee Plays,” ECM, 1982.
Score for “Something Wild,” MCA, 1986.
(With Rhuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su) Music for “The Last Emperor,” Virgin, 1987.
Score to “Married to the Mob,” Reprise, 1988.
Rei Momo, Luaka Bop/Sire, 1989.
The Forest, Luaka Bop/Sire, 1991.
Uh-Oh, Luaka Bop/Sire, 1992.
With Talking Heads; on Sire Records
Talking Heads: 77, 1977.
More Songs About Buildings and Food, 1978.
Fear of Music, 1979.
Remain in Light, 1980.
The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads, 1982.
Speaking in Tongues, 1983.
Stop Making Sense, 1984.
Little Creatures, 1985.
True Stories, 1986.
Naked, 1988.
Popular Favorites, 1992.
Sources
Books
Davis, Jerome, Talking Heads, Vintage Books, 1985.
Rockwell, John, All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century, Knopf, 1983.
Tamm, Eric, Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound, Faber and Faber, 1989.
Periodicals
Down Beat, January 1990.
Entertainment Weekly, March 13, 1992.
Melody Maker, October 14, 1989.
Musician, April 1992.
The Nation, May 20, 1990.
Pulse!, February 1992; June 1992.
Rolling Stone, November 3, 1977; October 19, 1978; November 15, 1979; November 29, 1979; October 16, 1980; October 30, 1980; June 9, 1983; October 27, 1983; October 25, 1984; November 6, 1986; April 2, 1981; April 21, 1988; March 19, 1992.
Spin, March 1992.
Time, October 27, 1986.
Additional information for this profile was obtained from a Luaka Bop/Sire Records press release on The Forest, 1991.
—Tim Taylor
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Byrne, David