David Byrne

David Byrne

David Byrne (born 14 May 1952) is a Scottish-American musician and artist perhaps best known as a founding member and principal songwriter of the new wave band Talking Heads, which was active between 1974 and 1991. Since then, Byrne has released his own solo projects on record, and worked in a variety of media, including film, photography, opera, and Internet-based projects. He has received Grammy, Oscar, and Golden Globe awards for his achievements.

Byrne was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, on May 14, 1952. Two years later, his parents moved to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and then to Arbutus, Maryland, when he was 8 or 9 years old. He graduated from Lansdowne High School in southwest Baltimore County. Byrne started his musical career in a high school duo named Bizadi with Mark Kehoe. Their repertoire consisted mostly of songs such as "April Showers", "96 Tears", "Dancing On The Ceiling", and Frank Sinatra songs. Byrne then attended the Rhode Island School of Design for one year before dropping out and forming Talking Heads in 1974 with fellow RISD students Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, later joined by Jerry Harrison. He also attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, for one year.

During his time in the band, Byrne took on outside projects, collaborating with Brian Eno in 1981 on the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which attracted considerable critical acclaim and featured a groundbreaking use of sampling.

Byrne married costume designer Adelle Lutz in 1987. They have a daughter, Malu Abeni Valentine Byrne, born in 1989. Byrne and Lutz divorced in 2004. Byrne currently lives in New York City.

In 1981, Byrne partnered with choreographer Twyla Tharp, scoring "The Catherine Wheel," a ballet prominently featuring unusual rhythms and lyrics. Productions of "The Catherine Wheel" appeared on Broadway that same year. In Spite of Wishing and Wanting is a soundscape David Byrne produced for the Belgian dance company Ultima Vez.

His work has been extensively used in movie soundtracks, most notably in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su on Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, which won an Oscar for Best Original Score. In 2004, Lead Us Not Into Temptation (music from the film "Young Adam") included tracks and musical experiments from his score to Young Adam. Byrne also directed and starred in True Stories, a musical collage of quirky Americana released in 1986, as well as directing the documentary Île Aiye and the concert film of his 1992 Latin-tinged tour titled Between the Teeth. He was chiefly responsible for the stage design and choreography of Stop Making Sense in 1984.

Byrne wrote the Dirty Dozen Brass Band-inspired score for Robert Wilson's Opera The Knee Plays from The CIVIL warS. Some of the music from Byrne's orchestral album The Forest was originally used in a Wilson-directed theatre piece with the same name. The Forest premiered at the Theater der Freien Volksbühne, Berlin in 1988. It received its New York premiere in December 1988 at BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Forestry Maxi-single contained dance and industrial remixes of pieces from The Forest by Jack Dangers, Rudy Tambala, and Anthony Capel.

Byrne also appeared as a guest vocalist/guitarist for 10,000 Maniacs during their MTV Unplugged concert, though the songs in which he is featured were cut from its album. One of them, "Let the Mystery Be", appeared as the fourth track on 10,000 Maniacs' cd single "Few and Far Between".

Byrne also worked with "Queen of Tex-Mex", Tejano superstar diva Selena, writing, producing and singing a song ("God's Child (Baila Conmigo)"), included on Selena's last album, "Dreaming of You", before Selena's death.

Byrne was the host of "Sessions at West 54th" during its second of three seasons.

Byrne founded Luaka Bop, a world music record label which releases the work of artists Cornershop, Os Mutantes, Los De Abajo, Jim White, Zap Mama, Tom Zé, Los Amigos Invisibles and others.

Byrne is also a visual artist, and has shown his work in contemporary art galleries and museums around the world since the 1990s. He has also created a number of public art installations, many of them anonymous. He is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery, NYC. In 2008 he designed nine bike racks around Brooklyn and New York: "David Byrne bike racks".

In 2001 a censored version of Byrne's single "Like Humans Do" was selected by Microsoft as the sample music for Windows XP to demonstrate Windows Media Player (not included in SP2 installs). The next year, he provided vocals for a track, "Lazy" by X-Press 2, which reached number 2 in the United Kingdom and number 1 on the U.S. Dance Charts. David said in an interview in BBC Four Sessions's coverage of his Union Chapel performance that Lazy was number 1 in Syria.

In April 2003, Byrne appeared as himself in an episode of The Simpsons, "Dude, Where's My Ranch?".

Byrne's latest solo album, Grown Backwards, was released on March 16, 2004 by Nonesuch. This album used orchestral string arrangements, and includes two operatic arias. He also launched a North American and Australian tour with the Tosca Strings. This tour ended with Los Angeles, San Diego and New York shows in August 2005. The following year, his singing was featured on "The Heart's a Lonely Hunter" on The Cosmic Game by Thievery Corporation.

There was another piece in the Times today about yet another 20 percent drop in CD sales. (Are they running the same news piece every 4 months?) Jeez guys, the writing's on the wall. How long do the record execs think they'll have those offices and nice parking spaces? (Well, more than half of all record A&R and other execs are gone already, so there should be plenty of parking space). They, the big 4 or 5, should give the catalogues back to the artists or their heirs as a gesture before they close the office doors, as they sure don't know how to sell music anymore. (I have Talking Heads stuff on the shelf that I can't get Warner to release.) The "industry" had a nice 50-year ride, but it's time to move on. Luckily, music remains more or less unaffected — there is a lot of great music out there. A new model will emerge that includes rather than sues its own customers, that realizes that music is not a product in the sense of being a thing — it's closer to fashion, in that for music fans it tells them and their friends who they are, what they feel passionately about and to some extent what makes life fun and interesting. It's about a sense of community — a song ties a whole invisible disparate community together. It's not about selling the (often) shattered plastic case CDs used to come in.

Returning to this work in the theatre, in late 2005 Byrne and Fatboy Slim began work on Here Lies Love, a disco opera or song cycle about the life of Imelda Marcos, the controversial former First Lady of the Philippines. Some music from this piece was debuted at Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia in February 2006 and the following year at Carnegie Hall on February 3, 2007.

Byrne and Eno's influential 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was re-released for its 25th anniversary in early 2006, with new bonus tracks. In keeping with the spirit of the original album, two of the songs' component tracks were released under Creative Commons licenses and a remix contest site was launched. Later that same year, Byrne released Arboretum, a sketchbook facsimile of his Tree Drawings, published by McSweeney's. He also had an exhibition of his chairs — drawings, photographs, sculptures, and embroideries — at Pace/MacGill Gallery, NYC.

In 2007, David Byrne provided a cover of The Fiery Furnaces' song "Ex-Guru" for a compilation to celebrate the 15th birthday of Thrill Jockey, a Chicago-based label.

In April 2008 Byrne took part in the Paul Simon retrospective concert series at BAM performing "You Can Call Me Al" and "I Know What I Know" from Simon's Graceland album.

In 2008, Byrne and his band programmed the Battery Maritime Building, a 99-year-old ferry terminal in Manhattan, to play music. Essentially Byrne has taken the old New York City building, hooked the entire structure - pipes, heaters, pillars and all, electronically to an old pipe organ, and made a playable musical instrument of it, for a piece called "Playing the Building". This project is markedly similar to an installation of his that ran in 2005 in Stockholm, Sweden, and to a series of installations performed by New Zealand and Detroit based artists Alastair Galbraith and Matt De Genaro, recorded on their 1998 record Wire Music and 2006 follow-up Long Wires in Dark Museums, Vol. 2.

Byrne and Eno reunited for 2008's Everything That Happens Will Happen Today and the former assembled a band to tour the album and other collaborations between the two through late 2008. He 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. The day after that album was released, Big Love: Hymnal - his soundtrack to season two of Big Love was made available. These two albums constituted the first releases on his personal independent record label Todomundo.

David Byrne is scheduled to perform at the 2009 Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tennessee.

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David Byrne (album)

David Byrne's self-titled album (styled "davidenryb") was released in 1994. "Angels" and "Back in the Box" were the two main singles released from the album. The first one entered the US Modern Rock Tracks chart, reaching #24, and its music video are very rare these days.

The album spent six weeks on the Billboard 200 chart.

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Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno Tour

The Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno Tour is a promotional concert tour of music co-written by David Byrne and Brian Eno.

Byrne has assembled a band to tour for the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today performing music from this collaboration as well as the duo's previous My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and songs from the three Eno-produced Talking Heads albums - More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, and Remain in Light. (The two also collaborated for several tracks on Byrne's The Catherine Wheel.) By performing music from all of their collaborations, Byrne hopes to "draw a line linking this new material with what we did 30 years ago, a little bit anyway." Although early reports indicated that Eno would be participating, he will not.

A month after releasing the album, Byrne was skeptical of market saturation, claiming "I sense that a lot of people don't know we have a record out" and hoped to counter-balance that ignorance with this tour. At the same time, the main goal of the performance was not promotion but the show itself.

Songs marked with an asterisk (*) included choreography.

Mid-way through this leg, Byrne expanded some shows to have three encores, such as Omaha, Indianapolis, Toronto, and Raleigh. The first as listed above, the second was "Don't Worry About the Government" and "Burning Down the House", and the third was "Everything That Happens". He also played this extended encore at the Hong Kong and Sydney shows. Byrne expanded his February 28th 2009 show to contain four two song encores.

Refosco previously toured with Byrne's My Backwards Life band in support of Grown Backwards; he also appears on Look into the Eyeball, Grown Backwards, Live from Austin, Texas, and Everything That Happens Will Happen Today playing percussion. The performers started rehearsals the day that the album was released and continued to rehearse more for this tour than is typical for other Byrne presentations. All performers dress alike in cream-colored jumpsuits and overalls. The dancers have choreographed for seven songs and the entire ensemble performed together for the first time on September 9.

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David Byrne Live at Union Chapel

David Byrne Live at Union Chapel is a DVD of a live performance by David Byrne released on October 26, 2004.

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David Byrne (footballer born 1905)

David Byrne (28 April 1905 – May 1990) is a former Irish football player who played as a forward.

Nicknamed Babby and born in Dublin, he joined Shamrock Rovers F.C. in 1926 and had three spells at Glenmalure Park. He also played for Bradford City, Shelbourne F.C., Sheffield United, Manchester United, Coleraine F.C., Glentoran F.C. and Larne F.C..

He won three senior caps for the Irish Free State making a scoring debut as a Shels player on 20 April 1929 in a 4–0 friendly win against Belgium at Dalymount Park. As a Rovers player he played against Spain at the same venue on 13 December 1931. His last cap was as a Coleraine player in a World Cup qualifier against Belgium, also at Dalymount, on 25 February 1934.

He was top scorer in the League with 17 goals when Rovers went unbeaten capturing their third League Championship in 1926–27. This was his first season and also the clubs first season in Glenmalure Park. He was Rovers top scorer the following season and in his second spell in 1929–30 and 1930–31.

He won four FAI Cup medals in a row scoring in the finals in 1930, the 1931 replay, the 1933 final and replay. In all he scored 85 League and 13 FAI Cup goals for the Hoops. He is the 6th highest goalscorer in Rovers' history.

He was the last surviving member of the 1931–32 double winners. Was also the first League of Ireland player to transfer to Manchester United and the first League of Ireland player to score 100 league goals.

He scored on his debut for Manchester United on 21 October 1933 and scored a total of three goals in four league appearances. He also scored on his debut for Bradford City.

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David Byrne (Irish footballer)

David Byrne (born November 14, 1979) in Dublin is an Irish footballer who currently plays in midfield for Finn Harps.

Byrne started his career with Shelbourne before a move to Scottish Premier League side Dundee United. During his season with United he made just one substitute appearance, playing the final few minutes at Parkhead in a 4-1 defeat to Celtic. Byrne moved back to Shelbourne, where he played for three years, picking up a league winners' medal. Spells at St Pat's and Derry City followed, before his move to Longford in January 2006. Byrne moved to Athlone at the start of the 2007 season.

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