Q 6

PLAYBOY: But you've had relative commercial success with concepts that were supposed to be box-office death. How have you succeeded where others have failed?

David Byrne: It's possible to do some things that are...a little unusual and still be accessible to a fairly broad public. The public is underestimated, pandered to. You don't have to pretend that people are stupid and you don't have to pretend that you are smarter than your audience. You do what interests you. That's all you can do.

Q 7

PLAYBOY: The New York Times called you the "thinking man's rock star." Isn't rock 'n' roll antithetical to the life of the mind?

David Byrne: I don't get too hung up on the words. The sounds of the words have as much meaning as their literal sense. But intelligent lyrics and rock 'n' roll don't have to be antithetical. Rock 'n' roll lost its innocence in the Sixties. Once Rolling Stone appeared, it was ruined right there. But even simple rock 'n' roll has that kind of intellectual awareness, or maybe just smarts. The Rolling Stones or John Fogerty--who I think of as playing basic rock 'n' roll--have something else in the music.

Q 8

PLAYBOY: How important is it to you that your audience understand what you are trying to say?

David Byrne: I don't know yet. I want the meaning to be in there but not specified. I do have an idea about the meaning of my song. If enough people come back to me and think it's about something completely different from what I intended, then the song wasn't very well crafted, because nobody got it. Quite a number of people thought that in Once in a Lifetime, I was trying to make fun of suburban middle-class life. But I was trying to write from the point of view of these people suddenly opening their eyes and realizing where they were. They were shocked by it and wanted to know how they got there. I juxtaposed that with a sense of surrender and relief, as if they were saying, "It's all right, even if it's a little absurd on the surface." Writing songs is a process of letting your own consciousness run loose and then reining it in. You spew out a bunch of phrases and words, almost at random. Then you have to be kind of schizophrenic about it and go, "OK, let's shape this stuff up and push it together and make a song out of it. Make a verse here. Make this rhyme with the other one." Pure emotion is sitting there like a blob and you have to whip it into shape.

Q 9

PLAYBOY: How do you feel about clubs full of people dancing to your song about a psycho killer?

David Byrne: I like that. It's sort of sneaky. I like that idea of the body accepting something before the mind does. I'm assuming that some of the people who listen just to the music might say later on, "Hey, what was that song about?" They might see the irony in it or whatever. Or they might not, which is all right, too.

Q 10

PLAYBOY: What's the history of Psycho Killer?

David Byrne: It was the first song I ever wrote. I had been listening to some Alice Cooper songs at the time--years ago--and I liked some of them. I wondered if you took those overly dramatic subjects and, in a sensitive way, wrote from inside the person's mind, would it work? It became a rock song, though it was intended as a ballad. It's fascinating to explore society's aberrations. Those things are in everybody; they just have gotten out of proportion for some people. I read a series of interviews with hijackers. That helped a lot, because some of them seemed to be doing it on a whim and others seemed to have a mission.

Q 11

PLAYBOY: What kinds of things are in your library?

David Byrne: Gosh. It changes a lot. Right now, it's all kinds of research. There's a book on filmmaking. There's The Sanctified Church, by Zora Neale Hurston, a black writer. Part of it is about black spiritualists in the early part of the century--healers and witch doctors. Also photo books. Books about architecture. A couple of books by Gertrude Stein.

Q 12

PLAYBOY: What do you watch on TV? Would you describe yourself as a consumer of pop culture? And what do you do for fun?

David Byrne: I hardly watch TV at all, I've been watching those documentaries on China. I listen to music, though I have to turn it off before I can start working, because it's distracting. The other day, I bought a couple of records: some African pop records, a George Jones record and one tango record. It's a real mishmash of stuff. I got a Gospel record--the Golden Gate Quartet, one of the original Gospel vocal groups from the late Thirties. Great stuff. As far as going out to relax, I went to a museum in Pasadena the other day and went to a Mexican restaurant for lunch and had some beer and then went to see Prizzi's Honor, which I liked a lot.