David Byrne Music Quotations

If anything, a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home, hardly. It's really only to be heard when everyone's out enjoying it.

Some artists and indie musicians see Spotify fairly positively - as a way of getting noticed, of getting your music out there where folks can hear it risk-free.

I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.

I encourage people not to be passive consumers of music and of culture in general. And feeling like, yeah, you can enjoy the products of professionals, but that doesn't mean you don't have to completely give up the reins and give up every connection to music or whatever it happens to be.

With music, you often don't have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don't know why.

I've made money, and I've been ripped off. I've had creative freedom, and I've been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will.

Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that's pretty much all you can ask.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone - a memory.

To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.

Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily.

Maybe it's naïve, but I would love to believe that once you grow to love some aspect of a culture-its music, for instance -you can never again think of the people of that culture as less than yourself. I would like to believe that if I am deeply moved by a song originating from some place other than my own homeland, then I have in some way shared an experience with the people of that culture. I have been pleasantly contaminated. I can identify in some small way with it and its people.