1. David Byrne is an American musician, writer, visual artist, and filmmaker.
63 Facts About David Byrne
1. 2.
David Byrne was a founding member, principal songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist of the American new wave band Talking Heads.
3.
David Byrne has received an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, a Special 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.
4.
When David Byrne was eight or nine years old they moved to Arbutus, Maryland, in the United States, where his father worked as an electronics engineer at Westinghouse Electric Corporation and his mother later became a teacher.
5.
David Byrne stated that he initially grew up speaking with a Scottish accent but adopted an American one in order to fit in at school.
6.
David Byrne was rejected from his middle school's choir because they said he was "off-key and too withdrawn".
7.
David Byrne's father used his electrical engineering skills to modify a reel-to-reel tape recorder so that Byrne could make multitrack recordings.
8.
David Byrne graduated from Lansdowne High School in southwest Baltimore County, Maryland.
9.
David Byrne started his musical career in a high school band called Revelation.
10.
David Byrne returned to Providence in 1973 and formed a band called the Artistics with fellow RISD student Chris Frantz.
11.
In May 1976, David Byrne quit his day job, and the three-piece band signed to Sire Records in November of that year.
12.
In 1988 the band quietly went on hiatus during which David Byrne launched a solo career and the other members pursued their own projects.
13.
Rei Momo was the first solo album by David Byrne after leaving Talking Heads, and features mainly Afro-Cuban, Afro-Hispanic, and Brazilian song styles, including popular dances such as merengue, son cubano, samba, mambo, cumbia, cha-cha-cha, bomba and charanga.
14.
David Byrne's fourth solo album, David Byrne, was a more proper rock record, with Byrne playing most of the instruments, leaving percussion for session musicians.
15.
David Byrne's sixth, Look into the Eyeball, continued the same musical exploration of Feelings, but was compiled of more upbeat tracks, like those found on Uh-Oh.
16.
David Byrne launched a North American and Australian tour with the Tosca Strings.
17.
David Byrne collaborated with Selena on her 1995 album Dreaming of You with "God's Child ".
18.
David Byrne assembled a band to tour worldwide for the album for a six-month period from late 2008 through early 2009 on the Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno Tour.
19.
In January 2018, David Byrne announced his first solo album in 14 years.
20.
David Byrne released the album's first single, "Everybody's Coming to My House", which he co-wrote with Eno.
21.
In 1981, David Byrne partnered with choreographer Twyla Tharp, scoring music he wrote that appeared on his album The Catherine Wheel for a ballet with the same name, prominently featuring unusual rhythms and lyrics.
22.
David Byrne was chiefly responsible for the stage design and choreography of the concert film Stop Making Sense.
23.
David 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.
24.
David Byrne wrote, directed, and starred in True Stories, a musical collage of discordant Americana for which he produced most of the film's music.
25.
David Byrne was impressed by the experimental theatre that he saw in New York City in the 1970s and collaborated with several of its best-known representatives.
26.
David Byrne worked with Robert Wilson on "The Knee Plays" and "The Forest", and invited Spalding Gray to act in True Stories, while Meredith Monk provided a portion of the film's soundtrack.
27.
David Byrne provided a soundtrack for JoAnne Akalaitis' film Dead End Kids, made after a Mabou Mines theatre production.
28.
David Byrne's 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.
29.
David Byrne directed the documentary Ile Aiye and the concert film of his 1992 Latin-tinged tour titled Between the Teeth.
30.
In Spite of Wishing and Wanting is a soundscape David Byrne produced in 1999 for Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus's dance company Ultima Vez.
31.
In 2003, David Byrne guest starred as himself on a season 14 episode of The Simpsons.
32.
David Byrne collaborated with Stanford University professor Mala Gaonkar in 2016 to co-create NEUROSOCIETY, a guided immersive theater performance.
33.
On February 29,2020, after a 30-year absence, David Byrne performed as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live with John Mulaney as host.
34.
David Byrne previously served as the musical guest as part of Talking Heads in 1979, and as a solo musical guest in 1989.
35.
In 2022, David Byrne again collaborated with Mala Gaonkar on another immersive theater production based on his life, "Theater of the Mind" transforming a 15,000 square-foot warehouse in Denver, Colorado.
36.
David Byrne has contributed songs to five AIDS benefit compilation albums produced by the Red Hot Organization: Red Hot + Blue: A Tribute to Cole Porter, Red Hot + Rio, Silencio=Muerte: Red Hot + Latin, Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon, and Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip.
37.
David Byrne worked with Latin superstar Selena in March 1995; writing, producing and singing a bilingual duet titled "God's Child ".
38.
In 1997, David Byrne was the host of Sessions at West 54th during its second of three seasons and collaborated with members of Devo and Morcheeba to record the album Feelings.
39.
In 2002, David Byrne co-wrote and provided vocals for "Lazy" by the English house duo X-Press 2, which reached No 2 in the United Kingdom and number one on the US Dance Chart.
40.
David Byrne released an orchestral version on his 2004 album Grown Backwards.
41.
In September 2004, David Byrne co-authored a CD collection and performed with Gilberto Gil at a benefit concert promoting the Creative Commons license.
42.
David Byrne says that the point of the project was to allow people to experience art first hand, by creating music with the organ, rather than simply looking at it.
43.
David Byrne collaborated with Dirty Projectors on the song "Knotty Pine".
44.
David Byrne was a signator of a letter protesting the decision of the Toronto International Film Festival to choose Tel Aviv as the subject of its inaugural City-to-City Spotlight strand.
45.
In May 2011, David Byrne contributed backing vocals to the Arcade Fire track "Speaking in Tongues" which appeared on the deluxe edition of their 2010 album The Suburbs.
46.
In May 2014, David Byrne announced his involvement with Anna Calvi's EP, Strange Weather, collaborating with her on two songs: a cover of Keren Ann's "Strange Weather" and Connan Mockasin's "I'm the Man, That Will Find You".
47.
David Byrne performed the song with Son Lux at the 95th Academy Awards, with Stephanie Hsu providing vocals in place of Mitski.
48.
David Byrne co-founded the world-music record label Luaka Bop with Yale Evelev in 1990.
49.
David Byrne's playlists have included African popular music, country music classics, vox humana, classical opera and film scores from Italian movies.
50.
David Byrne serves on the board of directors of SoundExchange, an organization designated by the United States Congress to collect and distribute digital performance royalties for sound recordings.
51.
In 2006, David Byrne released Arboretum, a sketchbook facsimile of his Tree Drawings, published by McSweeney's.
52.
David Byrne is a visual artist whose work has been shown in contemporary art galleries and museums around since the 1990s.
53.
David Byrne has been a speaker at the TED conferences.
54.
David Byrne describes himself as on the autism spectrum, but has not been professionally diagnosed.
55.
David Byrne had a brief relationship with Toni Basil in 1981 and he dated Twyla Tharp between 1981 and 1982.
56.
David Byrne had a relationship with the artist Cindy Sherman from 2007 to 2011.
57.
David Byrne is known for his activism in support of increased cycling and for having used a bike as his main means of transport throughout his life, especially cycling around New York.
58.
David Byrne says that he began cycling while he was in high school and returned to it as an adult in the late 1970s.
59.
David Byrne has written widely on cycling, including a 2009 book, Bicycle Diaries.
60.
In 2008, David Byrne designed a series of bicycle parking racks in the form of image outlines corresponding to the areas in which they were located, such as a dollar sign for Wall Street and an electric guitar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
61.
David Byrne worked with a manufacturer who constructed the racks in exchange for the right to sell them later as art.
62.
Two bike racks constructed from the David Byrne Bike Rack Alphabet, a system of modular letter segments that can be combined to form various words, remain installed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
63.
David Byrne came to the 2023 Met Gala on a Budnitz single speed bike.