People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that's pretty much all you can ask.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of pursuing one's passion for music and sharing it with others.
David Byrne reflects on the essence of living a musical life, indicating that the core desire for artists is to create music and share it with an audience. This sentiment underscores the value of artistic expression and the fulfillment that comes from engaging with the community through music.
In practice
In a speech at a music festival, one might say this quote to inspire aspiring musicians.
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.
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.
My music is best understood by children and animals.
Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather--rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm--is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there.
The anarchist painter is not the one who will create anarchist pictures, but the one who will fight with all his individuality against official conventions.
I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
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