One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you're allowed to fail.
Interpretation
Small audiences provide a safe space for failure and growth.
David Byrne highlights the importance of performing in intimate settings where artists can experiment and learn from their mistakes without the pressure of large audiences. This experience fosters personal and professional growth, enabling artists to refine their craft and build confidence before facing larger crowds.
In practice
In a workshop about performance art, you could say, 'As David Byrne said, one of the benefits of playing to small audiences is that you're allowed to fail, which is where growth happens.'
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.
When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.
I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You're not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.
You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.
Real sadness is such an all-encompassing intense thing that it takes you out of your humdrum existence. If you can still function, you want to show it while it's peaking. So when people tell you to cheer up, it's not always the best thing.
I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.
Success is a result of consistent practice of winning skills and actions. There is nothing miraculous about the process. There is no luck involved.
I've been working every year since I started acting, and I got many awards before I won the Oscar for 'The Queen.'
The biggest mistake that you can make is to believe that you are working for somebody else. Job security is gone. The driving force of a career must come from the individual. Remember: Jobs are owned by the company, you own your career!
There is no continuum for success. Focus on the progress, not the results.
Money is a good thing, but every morning you have to get up with something no one else in the world gets up with - that's that image. That face you see in the mirror, you got to love it, and you better do some things that you feel good about inside of you. Of course, money is going to come, but make certain that you do some good with it.
If you do the work you get rewarded. There are no shortcuts in life.
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