Fra interview med David Byrne i Rolling Stone (og hvornår, hvordan kan man se hans Spike Lee-instruerede koncertfilm? helt ærligt!)
The lyrics to one of your Talking Heads songs, “I Zimbra,” borrow from a nonsense poem by Dadaist poet Hugo Ball. How do you know when it’s time to stop making sense?
Never. My daughter has a young child, and I’m proud that I’ve shown him how to work a salad spinner with his head.
It was Brian Eno who suggested you adapt a Dada poem, leading
you to write “I Zimbra.” What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned
from working with him over the years?
We tended to work in a
different way each time we worked together. There was the stuff we did
with Talking Heads, that’s one thing, but when we worked together on
this My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
record, it was like a round robin, where one person makes a move, and
then the other person makes a move that reacts to that one, and you go
back and forth like that until you’ve built some kind of edifice based
on all your little reactions to things you’ve done. With some of the
other projects, there would be much more division of labor. With one
album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today,
he had done all this music that he didn’t know what to do with, so I
just said, “I’m not going to touch the music, but I’ll write words and
melodies over top of it, but I won’t do any music myself.” By making
that kind of tacit agreement, and saying, “I’m not going to mess with
your stuff, but I’m going to just add on top of it,” that worked out
really well. We discovered different ways of collaborating each time.
