Discover the Best Books Written by David Byrne

David Byrne is a Scottish-American singer, songwriter, record producer, actor, writer, music theorist, visual artist, and filmmaker. He was a founding member, principal songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist of the American new wave band Talking Heads.

Byrne has released solo recordings and worked with various media, including film, photography, opera, fiction, and non-fiction. He has received an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, a Tony Award, and a Golden Globe Award, and he is an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of Talking Heads.

Byrne graduated from Lansdowne High School in southwest Baltimore County. He started his musical career in a high school band called Revelation, then between 1971 and 1972, he was one half of a duo named Bizadi with Marc Kehoe. Their repertoire mainly consisted of songs such as "April Showers," "96 Tears", "Dancing on the Ceiling," and Frank Sinatra songs. Before dropping out, Byrne attended the Rhode Island School of Design and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

He returned to Providence in 1973 and formed a band called the Artistics with fellow RISD student Chris Frantz. The band dissolved in 1974. Byrne moved to New York City in May of that year, and in September that year, Frantz and his girlfriend Tina Weymouth followed suit. After Byrne and Frantz could not find a bass player in New York for nearly two years, Weymouth learned to play the bass guitar. While working day jobs in late 1974, they were contemplating a band.

By January 1975, they practiced and played together while still working regular day jobs. They founded the band Talking Heads and had their first gig in June. Byrne quit his day job in May 1976, and the three-piece band signed to Sire Records in November. Byrne was the youngest member of the band. Multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison, previously of The Modern Lovers, joined the band in 1977. The band released eight studio albums to great critical acclaim and commercial success. Four albums achieved gold status (500K sales), and two others were certified double-platinum (2 million in sales). The Talking Heads were pioneers of the new wave music scene in the late '70s / early '80s, with famous and creative music videos on the fledgling MTV network.

In 1981, Byrne partnered with choreographer Twyla Tharp, scoring music he wrote on his album The Catherine Wheel for a ballet with the same name, prominently featuring unusual rhythms and lyrics. Productions of The Catherine Wheel appeared on Broadway that same year.

He was chiefly responsible for the stage design and choreography of the concert film Stop Making Sense. Byrne wrote the Dirty Dozen Brass Band-inspired score Music for "The Knee Plays," released in 1985, for Robert Wilson's vast five-act opera The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down. He wrote, directed, and starred in True Stories, a musical collage of discordant Americana, and produced most of the film's music. He was impressed by the experimental theatre he saw in New York City in the 1970s and collaborated with several of its best-known representatives.

He worked with Robert Wilson on "The Knee Plays" and "The Forest" and invited Spalding Gray (of The Wooster Group) to act in True Stories, while Meredith Monk provided a small part of that film's soundtrack. In addition, the musician provided a soundtrack for JoAnne Akalaitis' film Dead End Kids, made after a Mabou Mines theatre production. Byrne's artistic outlook has a great deal in common with the work of these artists. The same year, he added "Loco de Amor" with Celia Cruz to Jonathan Demme's film Something Wild.

His work has been extensively used in film soundtracks, most notably in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su on Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, which won an Academy Award for Best Original Score.