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.
I sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production, just like most of my movies were.
It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.
I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented
What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements.
The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.
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