David Byrne: Big Wheel Keeps on Turning
Hugo Lindgren, New York Magazine: If David Byrne were a young man today, there is no telling what weirdness he might get into. When he and his band Talking Heads were loosed upon the world in 1974, even the mythic CBGB’s punk scene had its limits. Sure, you could scream and turn the guitars up as loud as they’d go, but if you had any art-school predispositions, as Byrne did, you buried them in the feedback. Which couldn’t be further from New York’s music scene today. “There’s no fear now about doing what, in my day, would have been considered incredibly pretentious arty stuff,” says Byrne, easing back into a metal office chair in the Soho loft that serves as his office and art studio. “The Dirty Projectors did a record a few years ago that was called The Getty Address, which had something to do with Lincoln and Don Henley, and some metaphor—this incredibly complex, convoluted construct. People from my era would have said, ‘Get the fuck out of here! Go back to art school with that shit.’”
