[MUSIC]
DAVID BYRNE: For a lot of people I say, "Well, I'm most well known as a musician.
I used to be in this band, Talking Heads."
And I can kinda leave it at that.
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DAVID BYRNE: I look back at the music I did in the early days, yes with..with some exceptions,
with a lot of pride.
I like..I think a lot of it holds up quite well.
But I have no nostalgia for that period whatsoever.
I don't..I don't miss the kind of the shit on the sidewalks and the junkies and everything
else.
I don't miss any of that.
That to me was..to some people that's part of the glamor.
To me that was not part of the glamor.
It was..that was just nasty stuff.
I remember that the music I made when I started off with Talking Heads, with that band, that
it was based from my understanding on, basically, a few simple rules.
They were all very negative rules.
They were all like "don'ts".
They were all like, no guitar solos, um…nobody plays anything that duplicates what anybody
else plays, I'm gonna use common language.
I'm not going to use kind of cliched pop music oh baby baby baby baby kind of talk except
maybe ironically.
But…just a little..like…maybe a handful of rules.
Not very many.
And then that…and that was it.
That kind of guided everything.
Atleast for a little while.
And then you can start to chip away at them and and let things kind of be what they wanna
be, but those rules kind of generate a whole thing to start with.
That sounds really…[laughs] that sounds…I know that for some people that can sound really
weird.
We wanna make a band.
Ok, what are the rules?
It's..that..it wasn't quite as kind of crazy and uh..kind of rule bound as that, but in
retrospect I can…I could tell that yes, we did had those rules, whether they were
spoken or unspoken.
Those rules were a reaction to what we perceived as being kind of the excesses of the music
that was all around us.
The pop music that seemed completely irrelevant and didn't seem to be talking to our generation
and we thought, ok, lets strip it down to what really matters for us.
I still have rules.
I recently finished a record with St. Vincent, Annie Clark, that's her given name.
We made a rule for ourselves that the band that we would work with would be primarily
a brass band.
It would be like a dozen brass players and there would be drums and stuff..ourselves
playing guitar with that, but that the main musical core of the..all the songs that we
were gonna write together would be based on this brass band.
So that was…we self-imposed this rule on ourselves.
When we started we thought we were going to be performing someplace where the sound system
was completely inadequate so having a band like that would mean you barely needed a sound
system.
And then we just said, "It's a good rule.
It's..it's really neat.
It takes us somewhere and it prevents us from kind of wandering off every possible place
we could go."
So yeah, I still live by that.
DAVID BYRNE: I love collaborating with different people.
It kind of pushes me outside of my safety zone and I like that.
The record I did with St. Vincent, a lot of it was done remote, passing files back and
forth via emails.
I mean we..we would get together and record everything together and mix everything together
and would just generally get together every once in a while just to kind of spend..uh…
face time, time talking just about how do you feel about this, how do you feel about
that, what's your interests?
All that kind of stuff.
But a lot of the writing was..yeah…definitely a lot of files being passed back and forth,
um… which I find that I am increasingly working that way.
Maybe people have a picture of musicians sitting down with two guitars or a piano and coming
up with a song and maybe that still happens, but I don't think that happens very much anymore.
I think people…one person starts with the germ of an idea and then somebody else adds
to it and then it gets passed back and added to again or changed a little bit and there's
some give and take.
Maybe some pushing and shoving, but that kind of passing, remote collaboration, it's a little
bit dangerous in that it leaves the window for misunderstanding to happen.
People will put things in an email that they might regret putting in.
But, it also allows for a lot of time in the collaboration.
You don't have to react to something immediately.
You can..you can wait over night and see how it sits with you.
If somebody sends something to you and you go, "woah this is kind of out of the blue.
It's a shock.
How do I absorb this?", you can..you can have 24 hours to see if it works for you or if
you can adjust your expectations or trajectory and figure out what..what it wants to be.
Instead of going only by your very first reaction.
[MUSIC]
DAVID BYRNE: I never try and second guess what an audience might like.
I assume that we're all human and that the Venn Diagram of what I like and what an audience
likes, there's some kind of overlap and that's where I make a living.
But I also realize that it's not a total overlap.
I have to just assume that I'm human, they're human, we have some common concerns and every
once in a while I'll get something [laughs] in that zone that I can't always predict it.
And I can never…and if I try to mold my work based on marketing considerations on
what I presume people are gonna like, I'm gonna fail.
[DING]
DAVID BYRNE: I'm David Byrne and you're watching Epiphany on THNKR.
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