David Byrne sat down with Anderson Cooper for an insightful interview that was featured in Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes.
The Talking Heads frontman discussed a number of recent and ongoing projects, including his arena tour combining high school color guard with the music of Nelly Furtado and St. Vincent, the musical he wrote with Fatboy Slim about the wife of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, his highly successful American Utopia tour/Broadway show, and his new immersive Theater of the Mind. Some of the most interesting parts of the conversation, though, are when he reflects on his history with Talking Heads, explaining some of the influences behind the band’s most famous songs and admitting that he could have handled the group’s breakup more delicately.
The interview highlights the vast range of Byrne’s interests and creative pursuits, which began but certainly did not end with Talking Heads. Byrne reminisces with Cooper as they watch videos from the band’s early days. “When you hear it now what do you think?’ Cooper asks.
“I’m glad I did it,” Byrne responds, “but I’m also glad that I didn’t stick with that … like, ‘Oh this is working. Let’s do more with this.’ I’m glad I decided, ‘No, now you have to do things that are a little more original musically.'”
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The pair goes on to discuss Byrne’s shyness, which Cooper says is surprising to see in a professional performer. “It does seem contradictory, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense,” says Byrne. “Your way of announcing your existence and communicating your thoughts to people is through performance, and then I can retreat into my shell after that, but I had made myself known to these people—what I was thinking and what I was feeling—so when that’s your only option, it’s a life saver.”
Byrne explains that his discomfort in social situations led him to become ultra-focused on creative pursuits, calling his focus a kind of “super power.” He also admits it sometimes made him difficult to work with. Remembering how he obsessed over the live show captured on the famous concert film Stop Making Sense, he says, “I might not have been the most pleasant to deal with at that point.”
Cooper confronts Byrne about the band’s breakup, asking if it’s true that he announced the end of the band to a reporter before discussing it with the other members. “I don’t know if that’s the case, but, well it might be. I think it is very possible I didn’t handle it as best as I could.”
The segment goes on to trace Byrne’s growth as both an artist and a person post-Talking Heads. Watch the full segment below.
David Byrne 60 Minutes Interview With Anderson Cooper [Full Segment]
In a bonus 60 Minutes Overtime segment, Byrne innumerates some of the inspiration behind a few of Talking Heads’ most famous songs including “Psycho Killer” and “Burning Down the House”. He calls “Psycho Killer” his second attempt at songwriting: “I tried to write one when I was in high school and it was really bad.” He explains that the song was inspired by Alice Cooper and Randy Newman: “I thought, what if those two got together and wrote a song about a serial killer?”
Then, asked about the genesis of “Burning Down the House”, Byrne says, “This was a record where we improvised a lot of the music, and I would kind of improvise vocalese nonsense syllables over the recorded music and go, ‘Okay, now I gotta find words to this.'”
He goes on to explain, “The ‘burning down the house’ phrase came from a Parliament-Funkadelic show that I saw where George Clinton and the others were shouting that to the audience. It wasn’t a song title, it wasn’t a lyric—they were just shouting it to the audience. I thought, ‘That’s a song. That’s a hook right there.'”
David Byrne On The Songs That Made Talking Heads Famous [60 Minutes Overtime Bonus Segment]