David Byrne

24:27I'm sure it didn't help. I'm sure it didn't help. But yes, there were times when I had a vision of what I thought a show should be or how something should be and lighting or whatever and i would get very yeah very adamant and bossy about it um i've over the years i've come to realize that that's not the best way to work with people this is a way to uh actually actually bring them in to welcome them into what you're doing and it becomes more of a collaboration is that how you worked when you worked with

25:18Bella Freud:Brian Eno. To some extent, yes. Yes, it was very much a trade-off. Like, you do this and I'll do this. Because he's someone with a very powerful vision. Did you find that easy to kind of, you know, flow both ways when you work with him? Sometimes it was easy. Sometimes it was very challenging. sometimes I think he intentionally wanted to challenge us or me and just to see what happens sometimes it's nothing much but sometimes you get something you didn't expect yeah it's very you definitely got something great I mean it's such a fantastic album I love that and on your new album who is the sky you write about love and in one of the songs it says is it my body or my brain and you've recently got married after swearing you'd never marry again and I wondered if you'd come to any new conclusions about love I've got the answers I need them no I certainly I don't.

26:44Well, I believe in my understanding now is we often think that these are strong emotions might be whatever, chemical or biological or something like that. And we tend to label them as psychological. but there are actual physical and chemical and neurological changes that happen in our brains when we have these kinds of emotions.

27:23So there are changes in our bodies and in our brains when we have these emotions. The emotions are not just ethereal things. They have, they kind of, there's actual physical changes that take place.

27:43Bella Freud:And did you find that those are sort of different variations of how you'd experienced them before? I'm always interested in how somehow something that seemed challenging or sort of overwhelming suddenly is the opposite, depending on who you're with, I suppose, partly and maybe your age or... Oh, definitely with age, some things I feel like, oh, I know how to do that now. Yeah. That's not terrifying.

28:27or yes, I can throw myself in the deep end and realize, oh no, you'll figure out how to swim.

28:34Bella Freud:Yeah, yeah. That's such a great image actually because what's the point in anything much if you don't throw yourself in the deep end and I'm definitely into that now. Well, yeah, I guess you do have to have a little bit of confidence that you're gonna be okay. But I suppose it's part of that thing to do with the zone between the knowing and the not knowing. It's that, isn't it? And it's quite stimulating. Yeah, you have to discover how to make this thing work. I'm currently on a concert tour. As I was beginning to work out what it might be, how it might be, friends would ask me, David, what's it about?

29:25What are you trying to say? And I felt kind of stupid because I couldn't give a good answer. I thought, oh, when I start to put things together, it'll tell me what it is it wants to say. I realize if I go in with a preconceived message or statement or something like that it's going to sound like that it's going to sound a bit didactic or stiff or too conceptual so I kind of let it evolve I trust that something will happen yeah that's really nice it especially when you do have things to say but they can become almost like armor rather than sort of an you know being more inviting

30:32Bella Freud:and people pay more attention i think when when it's more inviting there's something in it for them yes it's better to welcome people in and you just lecture them i always like in the vampire films they they can only go somewhere when someone invites them in and they're standing around on the doorstep dropping hints to the humans to say the magic words yes you must have There was that vampire movie, Let the Right One In. Oh, yeah, that was. Oh, I loved it. God, that was so good. That was another failed dinner party conversation. I bet. It's expressed. I was telling the story of that film. Yeah.

31:26Bella Freud:Yeah, it doesn't quite work as a story. It's so horrific. Yeah. My favorite one is what we do in the shadows about the three vampires. Oh, yeah, that's the comedy one. Oh, it's so good. And I've watched that a couple of times, the whole series. Wow. Yeah, I find it very relaxing and so funny and anarchic. It just hits the sweet spot for me. I love it. And if you fancy someone and don't like what they're wearing, does it kill your attraction to them? I don't know.

32:15Could be, yes, it could be. If I think someone's wearing something very inappropriate or you go, oh, this person's very attractive or really intelligent or really interesting or they really have something to say.

32:37And they're wearing something ridiculous. You sometimes have to get past that.

32:43Bella Freud:And what would the ridiculous thing be? Does anything spring to mind?

32:52Well, I have to say this current trend of nude dressing

33:05is when a few celebrities were doing it, okay. But now everyone feels like, oh, yes, I have to expose myself. Yes.

33:16Bella Freud:Anything in particular? What exactly is nude dressing? Men haven't started doing it yet, but maybe that's yet to come. But a lot of female celebrities have been doing it and kind of revealing their breasts and their backsides and all sorts of bits that were kind of generally covered up in the past. So that would... There's nothing wrong with the human body, but yes, it's a bit of a trend that's run away at the moment. I quite admire it in a way because I've had so many hang-ups about my body through my life and always wanted to wear something that covered my chin to toe, ideally. And now I'm sort of more appreciative of it.

34:19when I see people wearing very little,

34:24Bella Freud:I don't know how they can not worry about what happens to everything.

34:34Yeah, I thought that as well. I thought, careful you don't lean forward. Yes, everything might just fall out. I have a lot of respect for that.

34:49Bella Freud:I think, God, how great to be that free and to be able to be confident that this delicate arrangement will stay in place. It seems kind of fantastic.

35:04For the last 10 years, everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man. And as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in 2016, I've had a front row seat. I am officially running for president of the United States. It's going to be only America first. America first.

35:28Bella Freud:Thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building. But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm going to ask in our new show from Vox. The idea of like a post-Trump or not exactly Trump-focused show can exist because he's not really driving any agenda items. It really does feel like so reactive. You know, I think this Iran thing is also going to cause a big split in the GOP. So far it doesn't among like people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump. But like for the first time, you see on a major issue, open opposition from the start of this war.

36:03I'm Estet Herndon and welcome to America Actually.

36:08Bella Freud:In your book, How Music Works, one of your chapters is called Crappy Sound Forever. And you talk about a doctor who treated psychotic patients with music and he said it could soothe and calm them. And then he claimed that the natural properties of music were lost in the rush to digitize. and his patients became agitated and twitchy when they played digitized music. And do you think that's why people love live music so much?

36:45Well, yes, they might like the sound of live performances. I think a good part of that is people love being together with other people who are there to see and hear the same thing. It's a kind of big communal event where people join together with kind of like-minded people, or so they imagine at least. and the music, I hope they like the music, but sometimes it seems the music is really just a facilitator.

37:25Bella Freud:I mean, it was so interesting, that whole chapter about, and you talk about the dots and dashes of digitized music and immediately it doesn't seem to sort of flood into your heart the way music, you imagine music does. and then this crappy sound thing. And it was such a brilliant story also about how music technology was developed quite a lot for phone. It sort of came out of phone companies and the kind of improvement of sound when you're on the phone. yes it was uh what's the least amount of uh information that you can transmit via a phone line and it still be intelligible as in identifiable as the person you're talking to um and because they the phone companies wanted to cram as many conversations into the phone lines as possible, especially in the kind of international undersea cables where the number was kind of limited.

38:39So they kind of developed this kind of encoding technology where you could kind of encode voices and break them down eventually into digital bits. And that allowed them to kind of put a lot of signals, a lot of signals and a lot of voices into kind of a small number of lines. And that, yeah, and then the similar kind of thing was applied to music. How low or kind of how much can you reduce the information and it still kind of perceptually sounds like the music you're kind of used to hearing.

39:26Bella Freud:it's such a sort of contradiction but you say it can it's very effective too yeah it really fools us yeah did you ever read Neil Young's autobiography where he spent quite a lot of years dedicating to sort of dedicating himself to having another platform for hearing music that isn't so reductive. I don't know if, did you ever? No, I haven't read that, but I'm aware that, yes, he really focused on that for quite a bit, for kind of higher quality, higher resolution digital music files. Yeah. I suppose things are always interesting when they're a chord. I mean, even in, you know, how to handle experiences of life, I find I think of things as chords.

40:29So you've got some sort of creative thing going alongside your misery.

40:37Bella Freud:Or sometimes when I've been in a breakup from a relationship and that person is like, my thoughts are like chords where they always part of my thought until eventually thank god it wears off but have you ever had that experience um maybe not exactly but i've noticed with music a little bit like what you're saying you can have conflicting emotions occurring simultaneously. You can have a song where the words are really sad or tragic, but the music is really kind of has great groove and it's kind of makes you want to, it's uplifting and dynamic and ecstatic. So you've got two completely different feelings going on simultaneously.

41:40which I think echoes a lot of what we feel sometimes.

41:45Bella Freud:It feels like, I mean, if I think back to when I first heard your music and why it just went in so fast and it was immediate and it was something to do with some feeling of urgent questioning of life with all this fantastic kind of beat and things slightly to do with funk music, which I've always loved. And it was like, yeah, it was like when everything goes in at the same time, it sort of combined it so perfectly. And you've spoken about your autism and I wondered, has it changed as you've got older? Oh, yeah. I think I was much more socially uncomfortable when I was younger. Whatever it was, it was fairly mild.

42:46But, yeah, I remember at some point, I forget what year it was, when there was a number of articles coming out in different magazines about the spectrum. Oh, yeah. And a friend read aloud to me some of the symptoms that were described. He said, David, this is you. And I said, well, sounds like it.

43:21Bella Freud:What in particular? Was there anything you remember? Well, being somewhat socially uncomfortable, being maybe overtly, overly literal. Oh, yeah. Maybe being a tendency to sometimes focus very intently on some task or project or whatever. They're not all negatives. Some of them are kind of positives. Yeah. Yeah, because I was reading a bit about ADHD because there's also so much about it. And I read that you could grow out of it. And I recognized quite a lot of the things that I'd experienced, sort of chaos, really, and fuzziness, not dynamicness. I like the idea of being hyper-focused, but I feel like I'm...

44:17Bella Freud:And then I thought, oh, yeah, I've had that. And now I'm going somewhere else, which feels much better because it's more I like being able to think of what I have to do and doing it instead of it crashing around in my memory somewhere. That's encouraging. Yeah. It is. Yeah, it's really good because there's such a diagnosis industry these days and I don't know how helpful that always is. Yeah, sometimes it seems like people are looking for diseases so they can sell cures. Yeah, definitely. I mean, certainly it's great for some, for a lot of extreme sort of misery that it causes people. but somebody told me that their child was suffering from defiance disorder.

45:26Bella Freud:And I thought, isn't that what children are supposed to have? You know, you're supposed to question things. It just sounded so tragic. You mean kind of, no, mom, I'm not going to do that. I mean, I... Yes, that's what they do from time to time. Yeah, I mean, that's what you'd hope for. But I mean, and I watched your Tiny Desk concert and you were all wearing these blue outfits that you were talking about. And how did you come to that color? It was very practical. I did want a bright color. Yeah. I knew I wanted a bright color. We'd done a lot of gray in the past. I said, I'm done with your gray.

46:15so we went to a stage turned on the stage lights and I had brought with me a big bag of fabric swatches and I also had a couple I think they were cheap pajamas that I bought online but in bright colors and I said okay let's look at all these different things under the light and see what's going to work and the lighting designer that I worked with said, basically, the blue and the orange are working really well. The green, when you put a warm light on it, it tends to get muddy, the color. Yeah. I mean, that's just basically color science. So we just said, okay, we'll see if we can have both of those colors and alternate one on one day and one on another day.

47:13Bella Freud:Oh, right. Yeah, because I saw the blue. And I love Tiny Desk. And why do musicians love to gather behind that small space? What do you love about it? It's kind of a level playing field. Everyone basically is restricted in the same way. Oh, right. You can't be doing a lot of choreography in there. You're squeezing into this tiny space. You can't have all your lights and effects and whatever else you want to use. You're kind of reduced to just kind of playing, basically. Playing and singing. So it's nice. It makes every act have to kind of deal with the same restrictions. Yeah, a tight edit is sometimes a liberating thing, isn't it?

48:16Yes, exactly.

48:17Bella Freud:Do you think that's why everyone enjoys doing that so much? Yes, yes. You get to hear their performance or see it or hear their songs kind of stripped of a lot of the extra baggage. yeah i love it the bigger the group the better it was i watched one with trouble funk and there were so many people it was so good you can barely fit in there i know and in the credits to stop making sense there's a special thanks to paul thomas anderson and i wondered what he did on the film all right he didn't do anything in the film he um he did a chat and kind of introduced presented the film when we screened it uh the re-release the kind of revile the re-release version a few years ago in Los Angeles yeah I was curious he's such a fantastic filmmaker and And I love his work.

49:24Bella Freud:And I was so glad to spot his name on this fantastic. It was really nice of him to do that. Yeah. Yeah, he's an amazing director. I hope he wins the Oscar. Sure he will. Well, thank you so much, David Byrne, for being on Fashion Neurosis. Thank you. Thank you. It's been, I've had quite a few laughs and this is very relaxing. If I didn't have to be somewhere else, I'd be, I'd happily just fall asleep here. Oh, well, thank you so much. It's been great.

50:16Thank you.