If this sounds similar to the found objects movement in the visual arts, it is. With Eno, the songwriter used “cardboard boxes as kick drums, biscuit tins as snare drums,” endless repetitive patterns, and “found vocals”-singing taken from other songs. Working with Brian Eno, an avant-garde musician and producer who collaborated on several albums, Byrne put together My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, which threw the pop rule-book out the window. He describes the thought process that drove many of his decisions. we took reductionism pretty damn far.” In a rock world built on the idea of being a rebel or outcast, Byrne, “thought the most subversive thing was to look totally normal.”Īs Byrne tells it, his whole career-with Talking Heads and solo-can be seen as one massive process of stripping everything back and building it up again in new ways. Vincent earlier this year.)īyrne describes the origin and development of Talking Heads sound, designed in a calculated manner to set the band apart from previous modes of expression: “The range of pre-existing performative models from which to draw on was overwhelming – and artistically invalid. (Byrne still makes music at a steady rate. In time, the band started to work with more explicitly funky or pop structures, landing hit singles and popular music videos on MTV before officially breaking up in 1991. The innovative and influential Heads came up playing pin-pointed, guitar-driven rock behind a strangely charismatic frontman. Of 10 chapters, by far the most interesting are those on the subject Byrne knows best of all: Talking Heads and the music he had a hand in making.

The chapters are not chronological or sequential.” While Byrne suggests “there’s a flow to it,” there’s a lot of loosely related material here, and the book flows … but slowly.

Each chapter, Byrne tells us, “focuses on a distinct aspect of music and its context. His latest book, How Music Works does not qualify as an autobiography instead, his career as a musician serves as an entry point for a more general discussion about music.īyrne wants to teach and conjecture, discussing music’s connection to human origins, its history, its evolution, its strengths and its weaknesses. David Byrne acquired fame as the lead singer and guitarist of Talking Heads, one of the downtown New York bands that helped sweep punk and new wave to prominence in the late ‘70s.

How music works by david byrne