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David Byrne

David Byrne Quotes

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Famous David Byrne Quotes

“The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they'd be avaliable to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.”

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Book:How Music Works
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“With a lot of what we take to be true feelings, especially on pop records, we feel them because they're cleverly crafted. And because the words are written by somebody who knows how to craft words and draw on those things and convey those feelings. That doesn't mean they're dishonest. But it also doesn't mean that it's all just pure primitive emotion spilling out.”

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Author:David Byrne
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“Human beings have the incredible capacity for denial. I think they do. And although it's really hard to believe, I have my doubts. But my feeling is that first they have to convince themselves. First they have to justify this stuff to themselves and if they can do that, even for just the moment that it's coming out their mouth, then they can kind of mouth it with kind of believable sincerity, even if some of us.”

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Author:David Byrne
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“There was an op-ed piece in The New York Times by an evolutionary biologist or somebody - which was a curious place for the opinion to come from - and he said that there's no such thing as a completely free, uncensored medium, that people censor themselves all the time, in deference to hurting other people's feelings, or offending other groups, or in their own, not to provoke a fight. And you do self-censor certain things, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. That's just the way human social interaction works.”

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Author:David Byrne
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“There's still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don't. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn't communicate anything. It has to be mediated with some skill and craft, in order to communicate it to a second, a third, or a fourth person. That doesn't make it any less real. And it doesn't make it any less true. But it does mean that, yeah, it's the combination that makes it work.”

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Author:David Byrne
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