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Hey, podcast listeners, it's Anne. David Byrne is one of those artists who just keeps reinventing himself. First, he was the

frontman for the talking heads. Remember how he used to play concerts wearing that huge, oversized

white suit? Well, then he made films and wrote books. Lately, he's been making historical

musicals, one about Joan of Arc and another about Imelda Marcos.

He's also turned entire buildings into musical instruments, and he's just come out with an updated

version of his book, How Music Works, including a new chapter called Infinite Choice,

The Power of Curation. Here's Doug Gordon's conversation with David Byrne.

I think people want to attach narratives and other bits of information to the music that they hear.

They want to know what kind of person the artist is and where they came from and who they're

connected with, who played on their record. And then they look at that and they go, oh, I recognize that player, that person also played

on this other record or who the person who produced the record, who wrote the songs, and you

start to make a kind of this kind of connect the dots network of connections that leads you

to other music and that enriches kind of your sense of what the music is

and who makes it and why they made it and what it meant to them and all that kind of thing.

I mean, you can go always read that stuff in other, in the press or hear about it in shows like this one.

But in a lot of the, as music has moved online,

a lot of that kind of stuff has been cut away. Yeah. Music just becomes a file. Uh, it's a title,

it's a name with a song with a file and it's kind of floating unattached to anything else.

Yeah. But music doesn't exist like that.

It exists in the context of a person and a history and a society and everything else.

And I thought, bring back some of that in.

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