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.
I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful.
For 60 years, I was the most controversial figure in the country, and suddenly, I'm the most popular man in the land. Truth be told, I don't know when I was happier: then or now.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.
When Iβve been unsuccessful, Iβve been controlled. When Iβve been successful, Iβve been in control.
I thought I was going to be a bum the rest of my life.
In this world, the greatest rewards of success, wealth and happiness are usually obtained not through the exercise of special powers such a genius or intellect but through one's energetic use of simple means and ordinary qualities.
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