David Byrne: Rock Master of Multicultural Sound

You made your first African-influenced music with Brian Eno. What was the nature of that relationship? Was he both mentor and collaborator?
We first met him in London, and we’d hang out with him whenever we were there. This was all before we’d made any records together. So it kind of evolved in a very organic way, in the same way that when Talking Heads first got together, we weren’t getting together because any of us were virtuoso musicians. We just kind of got along as people, and music was the way we could work together. Then we started getting into some stuff that had other beats in it, that kind of thing. I know, for him [Eno] and me, it was a shared interest and enthusiasm. We were friends, and we’d exchange tapes. I’d have a tape of something from Africa, and so would he, without any idea of doing something with it but just saying, “Have a listen to this; you might like it,” or vice versa. And pretty soon, you know, we realized that something’s happening here.

Do you think that this openness – with Eno and all the guest musicians – is the source of strength that’s kept Talking Heads together for more than a decade?
That’s a big part of it. Once we established that we weren’t gonna always stick to one thing – although we always kept it more or less within a song framework – it was wide-open; it was almost like you could do anything. So it’s pretty hard to get bored. Yeah, that would be a good reason we could continue.

You’re obviously very protective of your privacy. Are you also attracted to the romantic image of the lone artist, or do you prefer being part of the extended family of a band like Talking Heads?
Well, I really love working with other people, whether it’s the band or whether I’m working on a film or a video or whatever. In my creative endeavors, it’s the most enjoyable. But I don’t know – I just don’t hang out with a whole entourage or anything like that all the time.

A lot has been made of your preoccupation with alienation. What do you think of that?
I certainly find it kind of exaggerated. I think it’s probably true in some of my material. To me, songs like “Road to Nowhere” are about surrender, not alienation. Maybe people are taking the words apart from the music. That’s a possibility. Or they isolate my body language or the tone of my voice without looking at it as a whole. It’s like, in terms of African sculpture, most people look at a sculpture that’s got 100 nails driven into it, and they go, “Oh, my God, what a horrible demon.” What can you say? It’s a reflection of their own sensibility. The thing is acting as a mirror.

They miss the moral judgment in that mirror. Speaking of subjective perceptions, there’s also a popular view of David Byrne as a rather cool and detached performer.
I sometimes find it disturbing or unfortunate. My intention has always been for the musical structures or the stage performance or even the lyrics to acknowledge their structure, to kind of let you see how they’re put together. Maybe for that reason people find it detached. But my intention has always been to have a lot of feeling in it. When I was perceived as detached or whatever, I often took that to be a criticism, and thought, “Well, how can I improve what I’m doing, what the band’s doing, so that that’s not the case?” I think that the Stop Making Sense movie made it pretty obvious that if that was the case at one point, it wasn’t the case anymore.

You’ve definitely turned in some wild performances. Do you see performing as a means of releasing your passion?
I suppose it is, but it’s more complicated than that. Maybe in the early ones it had to do with passion, which is, in its simplest form, an emotional outburst. But the later stuff became more about a sense of community and the whole catharsis that came from injecting some of your individuality into a group and getting something bigger back. And that’s a very different kind of passion from the passion of somebody screaming in your ear.

At an ideal level, do you think the performance of rock could become a form of religion for you, and even for the audience?
Yeah. I mean, that’s true. But like any religion, it always has the danger of becoming – oh, what’s that Zen saying about pointing at the moon and mistaking your finger for the moon? There’s always the danger of mistaking the thing in front of you for what’s behind it.