David Byrne
David Byrne speaking at the 2006 Future of Music Policy Summit hosted by the McGill University Schulich School of Music in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Background information
Born	(1952-05-14) May 14, 1952 (age 60) Dumbarton, Scotland, UK
Genres	New Wave, experimental pop, worldbeat, alternative rock
Occupations	Musician, songwriter, artist, singer, actor, director, film producer, record producer
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards, synthesizer, flute, clavinet, slide guitar, harmonica, autoharp, harmonium, violin, accordion buildings[1]
Years active	1974–present
Labels	Luaka Bop, Nonesuch Records, Thrill Jockey
Associated acts	Talking Heads, Brian Eno, X-Press 2, Fatboy Slim, The BPA
Website	www.davidbyrne.com
Notable instruments
Fender Duo-Sonic Fender Stratocaster

David Byrne (born May 14, 1952) is a musician and artist, best known as a founding member and principal songwriter of the American new wave band Talking Heads, which was active between 1975 and 1991. Since then, Byrne has released his own solo recordings and worked with various media including film, photography, opera, and non-fiction. He has received Grammy, Oscar, and Golden Globe awards and been inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Early life[link]

Byrne was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, to Tom and Emma Byrne. He was the elder of two children. Two years later, his parents moved to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and then to Arbutus, Maryland, when he was 8 or 9 years old. His father worked as an electronics engineer. Before high school, David Byrne already knew how to play the guitar, accordion, and violin. He was rejected from his middle school’s choir because they claimed he was "off-key and too withdrawn." From a young age, Byrne had a strong interest in music. His parents say that he would constantly play his phonograph from age three and he learned how to play the harmonica at age five.^[2] In his journals he says, "I was a peculiar young man — borderline Asperger's, I would guess."^[3][4] As revealed by Tina Weymouth in the commentary for the concert film Stop Making Sense, Byrne is left handed but plays guitar right handed.

Music career[link]

Talking Heads: 1975–1991[link]

As part of Talking Heads in 1978 Photo: Jean-Luc Ourlin

He graduated from Lansdowne High School in southwest Baltimore County. Byrne started his musical career in a high school duo named Bizadi with Mark Kehoe. Their repertoire consisted mostly of songs such as "April Showers," "96 Tears," "Dancing On The Ceiling," and Frank Sinatra songs. Byrne then attended the Rhode Island School of Design (during the 1970-71 term) and the Maryland Institute College of Art (during the 1971-72 term) before dropping out and forming a band called "The Artistics" with fellow RISD student Chris Frantz.^[5] The band dissolved within a year, and the two moved to New York together with Frantz's girlfriend Tina Weymouth. Unable to find a bass player in New York, Frantz and Byrne persuaded Weymouth to learn to play the bass guitar.

After some practice and playing together they founded the group Talking Heads which had its first gig in 1975.^[6][7] Multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison joined the group in 1977. The band released 8 studio albums before going into hiatus in 1988. David Byrne desired to go solo, but it took 3 years to announce that the band were breaking up in 1991. A brief reunion for a single "Sax and Violins" in 1991 occurred before again dissolving. The band were inducted into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, when they reunited to play 4 tracks.

Solo album career: 1979–1981;1989–present[link]

Byrne at London's Royal Festival Hall in April 2009.

During his time in the band, Byrne took on outside projects, collaborating with Brian Eno during 1979 and 1981 on the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which attracted considerable critical acclaim due to its early use of analogue sampling and found sounds. Following this record, Byrne took his attention on Talking Heads. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was re-released for its 25th anniversary in early 2006, with new bonus tracks. In keeping with the spirit of the original album, two of the songs' component tracks were released under Creative Commons licenses and a remix contest site was launched.

Rei Momo (1989) was the first solo album by Byrne, after leaving Talking Heads, that features mainly Afro-Cuban, Afro-Hispanic, and Brazilian song styles including popular dances including merengue, Cuban Son, samba, mambo, cumbia, cha-cha-chá, bomba, and charanga. His third solo album Uh-Oh (1992) followed that featured a brass-section and was driven by catchy tracks such as "Girls on My Mind" and "The Cowboy Mambo (Hey Lookit Me Now)". His fourth solo album, titled davidenryb (1994), was a more proper rock record, with Byrne playing most of the instruments on it, leaving percussion for session musicians. "Angels" and "Back in the Box" were the two main singles released from the album. The first one entered the US Modern Rock Tracks chart, reaching #24. For his fifth studio effort the emotional Feelings (1997), Byrne employed a brass orchestra called Black Cat Orchestra. His sixth Look into the Eyeball (2001) continued the same musical exploration of Feelings, but was compiled of more upbeat tracks, like those found on Uh-Oh.

Grown Backwards (2004), released by Nonesuch Records, used orchestral string arrangements, and includes two operatic arias as well as a rework of X-Press 2 collaboration "Lazy". He also launched a North American and Australian tour with the Tosca Strings. This tour ended with Los Angeles, San Diego and New York shows in August 2005.

Byrne and Eno reunited for his eighth album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (2008).^[8] He assembled a band to tour worldwide for the album for a six-month period from late 2008 through early 2009 on the Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno Tour.

Work in theatre and film: 1981–present[link]

In 1981, Byrne partnered with choreographer Twyla Tharp, scoring music he wrote that appeared on his album, The Catherine Wheel for a ballet with the same name, prominently featuring unusual rhythms and lyrics. Productions of The Catherine Wheel appeared on Broadway that same year. In Spite of Wishing and Wanting is a soundscape David Byrne produced for the Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus's dance company Ultima Vez.

In 1991, Byrne released a classical instrumental album The Forest, where some of the tracks were already featured as a score for 1988 Robert Wilson theatre piece of the same name.

His work has been extensively used in movie soundtracks, most notably in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su on Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, which won an Academy Award for Best Original Score. In 2004, Lead Us Not Into Temptation (music from the film "Young Adam") included tracks and musical experiments from his score to Young Adam. Byrne also wrote, directed, and starred in True Stories, a musical collage of discordant Americana released in 1986, as well as producing most of the film's music. Byrne also directed the documentary Île Aiye and the concert film of his 1992 Latin-tinged tour titled Between the Teeth. He was chiefly responsible for the stage design and choreography of Stop Making Sense in 1984. Byrne added "Loco de Amor" (Crazy for Love) with Celia Cruz to Jonathan Demme's 1986 film Something Wild.

Byrne wrote the Dirty Dozen Brass Band-inspired score for Robert Wilson's Opera The Knee Plays from The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down. Some of the music from Byrne's orchestral album The Forest was originally used in a Wilson-directed theatre piece with the same name. The Forest premiered at the Theater der Freien Volksbühne, Berlin in 1988. It received its New York premiere in December 1988 at BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Forestry Maxi-single contained dance and industrial remixes of pieces from The Forest by Jack Dangers, Rudy Tambala, and Anthony Capel.

In late 2005 Byrne and Fatboy Slim began work on Here Lies Love, a disco opera or song cycle about the life of Imelda Marcos, the controversial former First Lady of the Philippines. Some music from this piece was debuted at Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia in February 2006 and the following year at Carnegie Hall on February 3, 2007.

In 2008 Byrne released Big Love: Hymnal - his soundtrack to season two of Big Love. These two albums constituted the first releases on his personal independent record label Todo Mundo.

In 2010, David Byrne songs were featured on the soundtrack of Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Byrne and Brian Eno provided the soundtrack for the film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.^[9]

Other musical contributions: 1990–present[link]

Byrne has contributed songs to five AIDS benefit compilation albums produced by the Red Hot Organization: Red Hot + Blue: A Tribute to Cole Porter, Red Hot + Rio, Silencio=Muerte: Red Hot + Latin, Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon, and Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip. Byrne appeared as a guest vocalist/guitarist for 10,000 Maniacs during their MTV Unplugged concert, though the songs in which he is featured were cut from their following album. One of them, "Let the Mystery Be", appeared as the fourth track on 10,000 Maniacs' CD single "Few and Far Between". Byrne worked with the "Queen of Tex-Mex", Tejano superstar Selena, writing, producing and singing a song ("God's Child (Baila Conmigo)"), included on Selena's last album, "Dreaming of You", before her death. Byrne was the host of Sessions at West 54th during its second of three seasons and collaborated with members of Devo and Morcheeba to record the album Feelings in 1997.

Byrne playing; Austin City Limits, in 2008

In 2001 a version of Byrne's single “Like Humans Do”, edited to remove its drug reference, was selected by Microsoft as the sample music for Windows XP to demonstrate Windows Media Player (not included in SP2 installs).^[10][11]

In 2002, he co-wrote and provided vocals for a track, "Lazy" by X-Press 2, which reached number 2 in the United Kingdom and number 1 on the U.S. Dance Charts. Byrne said in an interview in BBC Four Sessions's coverage of his Union Chapel performance that “Lazy” was number 1 in Syria.

In 2006, his singing was featured on "The Heart's a Lonely Hunter" on The Cosmic Game by Thievery Corporation.

He is featured on the tracks "Money" and "The People Tree", on N.A.S.A.'s 2009 album The Spirit of Apollo. Also in 2009, David Byrne appeared on HIV/AIDS charity album Dark Was the Night for Red Hot Organization. He collaborated with Dirty Projectors on the song "Knotty Pine". In the same year, Byrne performed at the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tennessee. He also was a signator of a letter protesting the decision of the Toronto International Film Festival to choose Tel Aviv as the subject of its inaugural City-to-City Spotlight strand.^[12]

In 2007, David Byrne provided a cover of The Fiery Furnaces' song "Ex-Guru" for a compilation to celebrate the 15th birthday of Thrill Jockey, a Chicago-based label.

In 2008, Byrne and his production team programmed the Battery Maritime Building, a 99-year-old ferry terminal in Manhattan, to play music.^[13] Essentially Byrne took the old New York City building, hooked the entire structure - pipes, heaters, pillars and all, electronically to an old pipe organ, and made a playable musical instrument of it, for a piece called "Playing the Building".^[1] This project was also installed in 2005 in Stockholm, Sweden,^[14] and at the London Roundhouse in 2009. It bears similarities to a series of installations performed by New Zealand and Detroit based artists Alastair Galbraith and Matt De Genaro, recorded on their 1998 record Wire Music and 2006 follow-up Long Wires in Dark Museums, Vol. 2. Byrne says that the point in this project was to allow people to experience art first hand, by creating the music with the organ, rather than simply looking at it.^[15]

In April 2008, Byrne took part in the Paul Simon retrospective concert series at BAM performing "You Can Call Me Al" and "I Know What I Know" from Simon's Graceland album.^[16]

In 2008 Byrne collaborated with The Brighton Port Authority, composing the music and singing the lyrics for "Toe Jam".

In May 2011 Byrne contributed backing vocals to the Arcade Fire track "Speaking in Tongues" which appeared on the 2011 edition of their album The Suburbs.^[17]

Other work[link]

Byrne founded the world music record label Luaka Bop in 1990. It was originally created to release Latin American compilations, but it has grown to include music from Cuba, Africa, the Far East and beyond, releasing the work of artists such as Cornershop, Os Mutantes, Los De Abajo, Jim White, Zap Mama, Tom Zé, Los Amigos Invisibles and King Chango.^[18][19]

In 2005, Byrne initiated his own internet radio station, Radio David Byrne.^[20] Each month, Byrne posts a playlist of music he likes, linked by themes or genres. Byrne's playlists have included African popular music, country music classics, Vox Humana, classical opera, and film scores from Italian movies.

In 2006, Byrne released Arboretum, a sketchbook facsimile of his Tree Drawings, published by McSweeney's. Byrne is also a visual artist whose work has been shown in contemporary art galleries and museums around the world since the 1990s. Represented by the Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York, he has also created public art installations, many of them anonymously. In 2010 his original art work was in the exhibition The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.^[21]

Personal life[link]

While working on the film True Stories, Byrne met costume designer Adelle Lutz whom he married in 1987. They have a daughter, Malu Abeni Valentine Byrne, born in 1989. Byrne and Lutz divorced in 2004. Byrne began a relationship with the artist Cindy Sherman in 2007.^[22]

Although a resident of the United States since childhood, Byrne is a British citizen,^[23] and has never applied for U.S. citizenship. He lives in New York City.

Cycling[link]

Byrne is known for his activism in support of increased cycling, and for having used a bike as his main means of transport for most of his life, especially cycling around New York. He has a regular cycling column in the New York Times.

He says that he cycled when he was in high school and returned to it as an adult in the late 1970s. He likes the freedom and exhilarating feeling cycling gives him. He has written widely on cycling, including a 2009 book, Bicycle Diaries.^[24] In August 2009, he auctioned his Montague folding bike in order to raise money for the London Cycling Campaign.

In 2008, Byrne designed a series of bicycle parking racks in the form of image outlines corresponding to the areas in which they were located, such as a dollar sign for Wall Street and an electric guitar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Byrne worked with a manufacturer that would construct the racks in exchange for the chance to sell them later as artworks, and the racks remained on the streets for about a year.^[25]

Views[link]

Byrne also posts personal comments on the music and, occasionally, on the state of the recorded music industry. In July 2007, Byrne posted the following comment:

There was another piece in the Times today about yet another 20 percent drop in CD sales. (Are they running the same news piece every 4 months?) Jeez guys, the writing's on the wall. How long do the record execs think they'll have those offices and nice parking spaces? (Well, more than half of all record A&R and other execs are gone already, so there should be plenty of parking space). They, the big 4 or 5, should give the catalogues back to the artists or their heirs as a gesture before they close the office doors, as they sure don't know how to sell music anymore. (I have Talking Heads stuff on the shelf that I can't get Warner to release.) The "industry" had a nice 50-year ride, but it's time to move on. Luckily, music remains more or less unaffected — there is a lot of great music out there. A new model will emerge that includes rather than sues its own customers, that realizes that music is not a product in the sense of being a thing — it's closer to fashion, in that for music fans it tells them and their friends who they are, what they feel passionately about and to some extent what makes life fun and interesting. It's about a sense of community — a song ties a whole invisible disparate community together. It's not about selling the (often) shattered plastic case CDs used to come in.^[26]

Works by David Byrne[link]

Solo studio albums[link]

• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (with Brian Eno) (1981)
• Rei Momo (1989)
• Uh-Oh (1992)
• David Byrne (1994)
• Feelings (1997)
• Look into the Eyeball (2001)
• Grown Backwards (2004)
• Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (with Brian Eno) (2008)

Talking Heads[link]

• Talking Heads: 77 (1977)
• More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978)
• Fear of Music (1979)
• Remain in Light (1980)
• Speaking in Tongues (1983)
• Little Creatures (1985)
• True Stories (1986)
• Naked (1988)

Books[link]

• True Stories (1986)
• Strange Ritual, Chronicle Books (1995)
• Your Action World (1999)
• The New Sins (Los Nuevos Pecados) (2001)
• David Byrne Asks You: What Is It? Smart Art Press (2002)
• Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information with DVD (2003)
• Arboretum, (2006)
• Bicycle Diaries (2009)

^[27]

Film[link]

• Stop Making Sense - concert movie from Talking Heads tour (1984)
• True Stories (1986)
• Ile Aiye (The house of life) - Documentary (1989)
• Here Lies Love - concept album in collaboration with Norman Cook (released 2010)
• Ride, Rise, Roar - music documentary of his concert tour with Brian Eno (released 2010)^[28]
• This Must Be the Place - 2011

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Sytze Steenstra: Song and Circumstance. The Work of David Byrne from Talking Heads to the Present. New York and London: Continuum Books, 2010.
• John Howell: David Byrne. (American Originals Series) New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992.
• Ian Gittin: Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime: The Stories Behind Every Song.

External links[link]

Find more about David Byrne on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Images and media from Commons
	Quotations from Wikiquote

Wikinews has related news: Musician David Byrne sues Florida governor over campaign song

• Official website
• David Byrne at the Internet Movie Database
• David Byrne on Charlie Rose