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Real sadness is such an all-encompassing intense thing that it takes you out of your humdrum existence. If you can still function, you want to show it while it's peaking. So when people tell you to cheer up, it's not always the best thing.

David Byrne

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David Byrne
Age: 119
Born: 1905
Born: May 6
Actor
Artist
Blogger
Composer
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Film Score Composer
Guitarist
Music Journalist
Musician
Photographer
Still
Sadness
Best
Function
Real
Takes
Thing
Existence
Peaking
Always
Show
Encompassing
People
Tell
Humdrum
Shows
Cheer
Stills
Intense

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There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior.
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Sometimes the European and North American public like some things to be exotic and kept at arm's length. They don't want sometimes to know that foreign artists are doing something that's at least as relevant as what's being done here.
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A lot of that worked itself out in the recording.
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The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part.
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To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.
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Always be skeptical about simplicity.
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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.
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As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.
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We've gone through the urban renewal cycle in the '60s and '70s that really did a lot of damage to the fabric of urban life - neighborhoods bulldozed and highways pushed through, and all that kind of stuff that really destroyed the kind of social underpinning and the kind of mom and pop stores and all the stuff that makes a community viable.
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Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce.
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One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy‚ but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat‚ and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn't move to New York to make a fortune.
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Do I wear a helmet? Ugh. I do when I'm riding through a precarious part of town, meaning Midtown traffic. But when I'm riding on secure protected lanes or on the paths that run along the Hudson or through Central Park - no, I don't wear the dreaded helmet then.
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Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.
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Is giving in to the photographer's presumably natural impulse to compose and light well sometimes okay and not okay other times?
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The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?
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A lot of cities are making a real effort, neighborhood by neighborhood, to make themselves into a place where life can be pretty good.
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I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same
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I've been asking myself: 'Why put together these things - CDs, albums?' The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part.
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The world isn't logical, it's a song.
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Cycling can be lonely, but in a good way.
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