“A keen cultural observer…From music to films to art to the Internet to books, [Byrne] has become a public intellectual.” –The Los Angeles Times
Rock ‘n Roll-Hall-of-Famer and co-founder of Talking Heads David Byrne sits down and talks with singer-songwriter-guitarist David Lowery about his latest book How Music Works, which explores how profoundly music is shaped by its time and place. He explains how the advent of recording technology in the 20th century forever changed our relationship to playing, performing, and listening to music.
The book is a remarkable and buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. Acting as historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, he searches for patterns-and shows how those patterns have affected his own work over the years with Talking Heads and his many collaborators, from Brian Eno to Caetano Veloso. Touching on the joy, the physics, and even the business of making music, his new book is a brainy, irresistible adventure and an impassioned argument about music's liberating, life-affirming power.
Byrne’s book How Music Works is available for purchase at the program. Byrne will not be available for signing. View excerpt>>
Hear David Byrne signing This Must Be the Place at Live Jools Holland 2004.
Read an online interview with SmithsonianMagazine.com>>
