Video: David Byrne’s “Ride, Rise, Roar” Documentary Trailer

One of the best memories of putting together last year’s David Byrne icon issue was our after hours editorial staff screening of Stop Making Sense. We put it on the big screen in the conference room, ate pizza, drank wine and sat silent, fully confident that we’d made the correct decision in solidifying Byrne’s status as FADER idol. A year later, the documentary of the tour Byrne was on during and after our interview with him is about to be screened for the first time at South by Southwest, and we are definitely going to roll deep to go see it. With wine and pizza. Check out the trailer for Ride, Rise, Roar here and stay tuned for it to appear at a theater or laptop near you. (via The Playlist)

FEATURE: David Byrne Interview

Entering David Byrne’s Manhattan studio is a bit like walking into the office of the world’s coolest anthropology professor. The SoHo loftspace is littered with all manner of cultural ephemera. There is a wall of art books cozied up to a series of anatomical models from the ’50s, a handful of original paintings (some of which appeared on Talking Heads album covers), a small pyramid of canned artichoke hearts, various bicycles, a wall-size map of New York City and a bookcase filled with kitschy toys, a few of which are delicately balanced on top of a trophy from something called the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

At 56, Byrne is one of the few artists of his specific generation—the grimy, druggy, CBGB-powered Lower East Side New York of the late ’70s—to maintain the kind of visionary status that helped make him famous in the first place. Throughout his years with Talking Heads, his various solo recordings, collaborative projects and his work as a visual artist, writer, curator, record label head and bicycling impresario—Byrne remains a kind of artist’s artist. While too many of his peers have retired, died, faded from view or resigned themselves to making a living trading on the nostalgia of their early work, Byrne remains an iconoclast—doing a little bit of anything and everything with whomever he chooses.

Having just released another career-defining album—the Brian Eno collaboration Everything That Happens Will Happen Today—and embarked on a globe-circling tour, today’s David Byrne is a far cry from the anxious art school dropout seen jittering through old concert films. These days he is happy and relaxed, genuinely interested and infinitely interesting.

Does it feel weird to be the icon?
Oh yeah. It’s pretty weird. You just go about your business trying to do things. I don’t think about stuff like that very much.

You don’t strike me as someone that’s very interested in nostalgia.
No. I only get nostalgic for things like old neighborhoods. I get nostalgic when an old building I like gets torn down.

When CBGB closed, everyone got very sentimental. Don’t you think sometimes it’s good to just let things die and remember them for what they were?
Yes. Just let something else happen now, you know? That bar stayed pretty vibrant for a really long time—longer than most places. There were some other good scenes to spring from that place in later years—particularly the anti-folk stuff—but most emerging music had long since started to happen elsewhere. It remained a good place to get cheap beer right until the end, but it hadn’t supported a vibrant, emerging music scene in a long time.

You’ve always been super cognizant about emerging music.
Oh yeah. It’s a bit overwhelming. All the mp3 blogs and stuff—I love it. I think most people my age don’t really feel like they have the time to fully explore, but it’s very worthwhile for me. I find so much new music really inspiring.

You appear so much more at ease these days, so much less anxious—both on stage and in your music.
Yeah, that’s true. I’m certainly much less anxious than I was back in the day. For some people, that’s not as good. For some people, the anxiety and the tension of the early performances was the thing they really loved. Still, for the person experiencing it, it’s not very much fun. I’ll admit that anxiety and angst can certainly produce some interesting work, but it’s not the only way to make music. I’m a lot less angsty and anxious than I used to be, but I’m also older now. I’ve been through some ups and downs, you know? I certainly care a lot about what I do, but I’m also not as obsessive and crazy as I used to be. I’m much more relaxed. I don’t think the work suffers as a result of me not obsessing over it and micromanaging every tiny detail of everything.

Your current tour focuses specifically on your work with Brian Eno, including songs you recorded with Talking Heads. How has your relationship to those older songs changed over the years?
I’ve played some of those songs fairly recently, so for a lot of them it’s not really that strange to revisit. There are some songs—“Air” from Fear of Music—that I haven’t performed since 1979, which is very odd. There are a few of them that conjure this ghost in my mind of where I was and what kind of weird places my mind would go to when I wrote songs. A song like “Heaven,” for example… I remember that Jerry Harrison worked on the verses a lot for that song and we really wanted it to be like a Neil Young song, which is kind of believable. The choruses were written by me and I wrote them by saying the words over and over into an early Walkman—one of those ancient, giant versions—and I’d just repeat the words over and over again until I could figure out the melody. It wasn’t intuitive at all. It was just some weird thing that happened. When I think back now it just seems like the weirdest way to write something. I read somewhere that Bon Iver does something similar—just repeating the melodies over and over until words start to emerge.

Has your creative process changed?
Well, I’m sure it has changed—but I’m not sure how. To some extent, when you are younger, when you sit down to write a song it’s a slightly new experience each time. You are figuring out whether or not you have the skill to do it. After a while you realize that you have the skill, but that it’s gonna get stale and repetitive unless you continually throw yourself out of the comfort zone and try doing things that you don’t quite know how to do. It has to keep changing.

Do you feel more comfortable in the role of collaborator than you do as a solo artist?
It’s definitely easier to be a collaborator. I obviously like writing stuff by myself as well, but it’s easier to work with someone else. You know, sometimes you start something and then there’s someone else there to finish it, or you have someone else’s material and the initial direction has already been decided. It saves you from sitting in front of an empty computer screen or a blank piece of paper and trying to figure out what to do first. It’s nice when the train is already in motion and all you have to do is jump on board.

Young bands generally have a much wider, more fluent musical vernacular these days. They’ve grown up with a broader frame of reference.
I love that. I think it’s so exciting. There were a couple of decades there where things were becoming really segregated, in which musicians would only reference other artists who were doing the exact same thing. It’s much more exciting to hear music that pulls from all these different genres and styles. I’ve always been a champion of that.

You are in the midst of a lengthy world tour right now. Do you enjoy touring?
I enjoy touring now, but I don’t think I always did. In the early days of Talking Heads I really had to get on stage and perform because I just had to do it. It was the only way that I could really properly express myself. I was very socially inept and the only way I felt like I could get my point across was to get on stage. Then later, I went through a period when it became slightly more joyous, but I was still pretty angsty and very much, It has to be done this way, and I’m sure I wasn’t the most fun guy to work with. Nowadays it feels like a total joy to just perform. Maybe it’s because of the musicians I surround myself with and the technical crew I have, but mostly it’s just because I still enjoy the physical act of singing. The physical release of it. The pleasure of getting a good groove going. It’s not like I want to be like Bob Dylan, doing it every day for the rest of my life, but when I do it now it’s a total pleasure.

When you see images of yourself when you were younger or old performance footage, is it hard for you to watch? Do you just think, Oh, there’s that guy again?
Yeah, it’s just that guy. I feel so distant from most of it. It’s just, Look at that guy and look at what that guy was doing. Sometimes I’ll think, Yeah, that was pretty great but I could never do that now. Meaning that there were certain things that I wrote that I would probably never come up with now. They just sort of tumbled out of me. Now I’m a much different person. I’m not thinking about the same things.

You’ll be doing another “Playing The Building” installation in London, right?
Yeah, it’s at the Roundhouse in London, which was once an old train station. It’s actually the first place that the Talking Heads played in London. We played with The Ramones. It was the first US punk show over there. The building has been newly renovated and it’s a really amazing space. And your book, The Bicycle Diaries, is out this fall.

Did you ever imagine that your love of biking would become such a big part of your creative life?
No, not at all. The book is a record of things I’ve written over the past 15 years, biking all over the world in different cities. I started writing as a kind of therapy, usually about things that were pissing me off. Some personal things, some more socially-related things. For a long time I felt like biking was this cause that I’d taken on. I knew it was this really fast, cheap way to get around. It was easy to get around the Lower East Side and see shows and meet up with friends. It seems like a fascination that was much too nerdy for anyone else to really get into. It’s still a pretty nerdy thing to be into, but other people seem to like it now as well.

What about your long-in-the-works Imelda Marcos musical?
It’s coming along. I spent about a year going around to different theaters trying to get money to stage it somewhere, but no one would really go for it.

Because the idea was too weird?
It’s obviously not too weird. It’s me and Fatboy Slim. It’s songs. It’s not really weird. If it were more “arty” we might have gotten further. The songs are actually quite catchy, but they aren’t catchy in a Broadway sort of way. It’s neither fish nor fowl. So, instead of staging it, I just decided to finish it as a record. I invited all these different people to sing various songs. Sharon Jones did a song, Tori Amos did one, Santi White—there are 22 songs.

Are you doing any design work right now?
Not at the moment, but I might be doing more of the bike racks around the city.

Do you have one in front of your own house? You should demand it.
No, but just this morning I went to buy some peanut butter and the owner of Gourmet Garage saw me and said that he wanted a bike rack out front. I told him I’d draw one up.

You seem to have a pretty laid back life in NYC. Do people bother you much or stop you on the street?
Not too often, really. I figure that if you act like a regular person then you get treated like a regular person. If you walk around with an entourage, then you’re basically asking to be treated weirdly.

Fame never felt burdensome for you?
No. Hardly ever. The only downside, as far as I can tell, is that you have to be a good, decent person.

Fame makes you good and decent?
Well, someone is always watching. You have to leave a good tip, otherwise someone will blog about it and you look like a jerk. That sort of thing. Everyone knows about the good parts of fame. You can walk into a restaurant and always get a good seat. It’s not really fair, but it’s nice.

Do you have a sense of what kind of music you’d like to make next?
Oh no. I never do. Once this tour is over and I get back home, I’ll start fooling around with some ideas. It usually takes a while to see what direction things are moving in, but eventually whatever has been percolating in my mind will reveal itself and suddenly I’ll just think, Yes, there it is!

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David Byrne and Fatboy Slim f. Santigold, “Please Don’t” MP3

Ok, up until about two weeks ago we would have been like “Fatboy Slim, please don’t do anything ever again,” and, if we were British, we’d probably feel that way still. But then we heard some DJs playing “Praise You” and it was a miracle. That song is good. Let’s let the man live. Live he has, recording an album of collaborations with David Byrne. Byrne and Santigold, well, you know how we feel about them two. Both have graced the cover of our magazine (not to mention the cover of our hearts. Feelings!). All together, “Please Don’t” is a strange brew of funky production and wonderful, reliable Santi. Something is telling us maybe Vernon Reid had something to do with this. In the late ’80s, Byrne put out a Latin-tinged album, Rei Momo. It was surprisingly good. This has hints of the same type of genre journey, an experiment in something someone probably does better. But we can’t pinpoint what that is. Not sure if that is good or bad.



Download: David Byrne and Fatboy Slim f. Santigold, “Please Don’t”

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Artists on Bikes: David Byrne, Ryan McGinley, Aurel Schmidt and More

The Swiss Institute assembles an interesting cast of calendar boys and girls for their annual limited-edition stocking stuffer this year, including Aurel Schmidt, Rita Ackerman and Cindy Sherman. All the artists are photographed on their bikes, although clearly some of the artsy pedal-pushers are more gangster than others—Ryan McGinley (October), for example, has no trouble dodging rogue cabbages in Chinatown, even with midnight black Ray-Bans on, while Terry Richardson (August) looks like he’s never quite made it out the door of his SoHo loft with his shiny collection of fixed gears. (via High Snobiety.)

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Live: David Byrne Brings Future Funk to Vermont

With outfits matching his shock of white hair, David Byrne—our current Icon Issue honoree—brought the same oddball dance and music troupe we saw a couple months ago at Radio City to a remote hillside in Northern Vermont on Monday to play a highly-choreographed set, mostly culled from his frequent collaborations with Brian Eno. It was a family-friendly funk show, with an adoring crowd politely eschewing the weirdly-enacted “No Dancing in Front of the Stage” law to groove in what might be the most picturesque concert setting outside of Red Rocks or the Gorge (even the Port-o-Lets tucked behind a stand of pine were pretty). Byrne worked through a mix of Talking Heads hits (“Crosseyed and Painless,” “Once in a Lifetime,” “Take Me to the River,” “Life During Wartime”) and Byrne-Eno gems (“Help Me Somebody” from the seminal My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) with a nervy confidence and strut that threatened to melt all the free Ben & Jerry’s being doled out from a truck parked at the top of the hill. The adoration was mutual—Byrne wound up playing three encores despite the mountain air dropping from almost comfortable to “I should’ve worn pants” levels.

Download the current Icon Issue, check out our interactive slideshow of David Byrne’s insane office narrated, just for you, by the Luaka Bopster himself, and by all means check out Byrne’s Band of Merry Dancers on his current tour, coming to a hillside near you. Setlist after the jump and more photos over on The Tripwire.

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Slideshow: David Byrne Takes Us on a Guided Tour of His Insane Office, Part III

In our current issue, along with all of its other David Byrne-related wonder, you can see regular FADER contributor Jason Nocito’s intimate photos of Byrne in his massive office at the Todo Mundo headquarters. Because of the natural constraints of paper magazines, we were neither able to fit every photo in the issue nor have Byrne explain what you were looking at. Fortunately, we have the internet, and Byrne was generous enough to record this guided audio tour of all the peculiar objects and ephemera photographed by Nocito that otherwise would’ve never been seen. We had so much material, and Byrne had so much to say, we’ve decided to split it into three parts, the last of which focuses on the many personal works of art that adorn the space. See and hear above. And as a bonus, head over to NPR to listen to Byrne and many others perform at the recent Dark Was The Night concert at Radio City Music Hall.

Part I
Part II

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Slideshow: David Byrne Takes Us on a Guided Tour of His Insane Office, Part II

In our current issue, along with all of its other David Byrne-related wonder, you can see regular FADER contributor Jason Nocito’s intimate photos of Byrne in his massive office at the Todo Mundo headquarters. Because of the natural constraints of paper magazines, we were neither able to fit every photo in the issue nor have Byrne explain what you were looking at. Fortunately, we have the internet, and Byrne was generous enough to record this guided audio tour of all the peculiar objects and ephemera photographed by Nocito that otherwise would’ve never been seen. We had so much material, and Byrne had so much to say, we’ve decided to split it into three parts, the second of which you can see and hear above, with a full explanation of Byrne’s bong collection.

See Part I here.

Part III

Slideshow: David Byrne Takes Us on a Guided Tour of His Insane Office, Part I

In our current issue, along with all of its other David Byrne-related wonder, you can see regular FADER contributor Jason Nocito’s intimate photos of Byrne in his massive office at the Todo Mundo headquarters. Because of the natural constraints of paper magazines, we were neither able to fit every photo in the issue nor have Byrne explain what you were looking at. Fortunately, we have the internet, and Byrne was generous enough to record this guided audio tour of all the peculiar objects and ephemera photographed by Nocito that otherwise would’ve never been seen. We had so much material, and Byrne had so much to say, we’ve decided to split it into three parts, the first of which you can see and hear above.

Part II
Part III

FEATURE: Grizzly Bear on the Soft Edge of Stardom

  • story Matthew Schnipper
  • photo Jason Nocito

The best thing about Pitchfork’s Veckatimest review is that the reviewer doesn’t seem to realize how deeply he’s been affected by Grizzly Bear. He goes on for over 1,000 words without really saying much to persuade anyone to buy the album, but says it in geographically and historically bewildering blend of English idioms and dialect—a couple Lord know’s, some ain’ts, a Shakespearean plea for shopping and a few dudeses. If you don’t actually care about his opinion, it’s a pretty good conceptual rendering of the album itself, which taken as a whole, could be the greatest work of Hillbilliamsburg musical theater we will ever hear. This is why we chose to put Grizzly Bear in our current David Byrne icon issue, because they are not afraid to go all out in search of beauty, in the same way Byrne did and still does. Read the feature story after the jump, and make sure to pick up Veckatimest today at your favorite music shop.

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Slideshow: Todo El Mundo

With his book The Cycling Diaries out this fall, the fashion spreads in our current icon issue pay homage to David Byrne’s transportation habits. We talked about the insane logistics of this story a couple of weeks ago—an 80-days-around-the-world affair that involved shipping clothes to all four corners of the planet. This slideshow features the best outtakes of the story and is a rare opportunity to follow six very stylish cyclists beyond the pages of the magazine–past city centre canals in Rome, fields in Bangladesh and deserts in Egypt. And to round out the Byrne-centricity, we’ve featured the colorful music of Byrne’s old label, Luaka Bop, all available for purchase on iTunes.

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