David Byrne Quotes

I work very closely with my publisher and just give them tons and tons of music, and then they link that with different songwriters and stuff. I'm basically a workaholic. So, I figured I might as well just start working outside.

I think the Internet is going to open up a lot of possibilities with music, and the shake-up of power is exciting to me.

The point is, technology has empowered so many musicians, you know?

Ultimately, I'm not the most prolific person, but I've been doing this for a long time, and I keep on putting out music. The only thing that drives music is the people who are making it.

I've always dreamed of having an album. The problem is that it's just very difficult to make an album nowadays because through technology, music shifts so fast, especially electronic music. Once you make five songs, the first one you did is already old and you wished you would have put it out right away. So that's kind of the difficult part.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

To make a rock'n'roll record, technology is the least important thing.

With music, you're working with a producer, and you walk out of the studio six hours later with a track that's almost completely finished. There's an almost immediate payoff.

Coming to Nashville has been so motivating and inspirational. Just watching people live and breathe their music and create something that they can feel from start to finish.

The biggest problem is always getting hits. That's the one thing that has never changed. The way of delivering music has changed, the way of listening to it has changed, the way of distributing it has changed, but it's always the music.

I had two passions growing up - one was music, one was technology. I tried to play in a band for a while, but I was never talented enough to make it. And I started companies. One day came along and I decided to combine the two - and there was Spotify.

I've never forgotten a single record I cut or a song I wrote.

I had a long, long time to make 'Rubberband,' and I originally thought that that record would last two years. Once I got over realizing that that's not gonna happen, and sort of got my perspective back, I realized, 'Man I'm really fortunate. I get to write music, make music for a living.'

If you're thinking the road ahead is a little shorter than the one behind you, you're thinking about trying to write a good song and hoping to make a decent record of it.

People keep inventing all these new machines, and producers and recording engineers keep wanting to use them.

Even if it's a song I know isn't gonna do that well, I'm dropping it as a piece of art, so I always want sick visuals to go with it.

Now anybody can make music at home, and you can hear music on any computer without having to buy it. Everything is apparently better with all the machines we have now, but at the same time, the quality of life is not improving.

At the end of the day, every decision I make about my music is about creating a collective.

[Doing music] is time consuming, will drain you, and stress you out at times. But in the end if you love doing it, and you're putting out music you're proud of, it will never feel like work. It'll just feel like love.

I'm just doing what I do best and that's what makes good music, and that's how you can relate to people.

I know texture is really important, but I think texture and stuff precedes songwriting a lot of the time these days.

I am devoting some time to music. I'm finding a balance in my life right now so that when I'm not acting I'm really working on the music side of things... producing and writing and recording and also getting to do some live shows. It's a really exciting thing.

I still write music, and I still have sessions, and I still record, but I have no plans.

All songwriters are links in a chain.