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.
Beauty's where you find it; not just where you bump and grind it.
You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'
Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words.
I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.
I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I'm making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can't communicate otherwise.
The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.