David Byrne once picked his greatest success for his career: “I took the plunge”
Everything David Byrne touches seems to turn to gold. Whether it’s music, live performance, theatre, film, positive news websites or just a big oversized suit, the Talking Heads frontman has an innate ability to make great art out of anything and leave audiences stunned. Byrne has a ravenous appetite for creation, one that, lucky for us, shows no sign of stopping any time soon.
Of course, Byrne is most well-known for his contributions to post-punk pioneers Talking Heads in the late 1970s and 1980s. As the band’s frontman, Byrne led their genre-blending sound with his talky vocals, penning tales of psycho killers and longing for home over ever-shifting instrumentation. On stage, he had uncontrollable energy levels, sprinting around his bandmates at will.
Even though Talking Heads is Byrne’s most famous project, it isn’t the one he considers to be his greatest success. “Some of the stuff I did with Talking Heads was probably the biggest,” he acknowledged during a conversation with AXS TV, “As far as reaching the biggest audience. Definitely, by that measure, that was the biggest success.” But Byrne seems fairly unconcerned with commercial success.
“There’s things I’ve done that have not been quite as popular,” he continued, “But sometimes those are the ones where I go, ‘That’s where I made a breakthrough.’” Take, for example, his recent venture into Broadway with American Utopia, a truly stirring meditation on what it means to be human and to connect with other humans, or John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch.
However, one project in particular stands out to Byrne as his greatest success: working in the realm of Latin music. In the 1990s, he collaborated with Marisa Monte and Caetano Veloso as part of his contributions to compilations by the Red Hot Organisation, later working on a full album with the latter artist. He also took to stages in Latin America.
“I guess, maybe, 20 years ago, I worked with a lot of Latin musicians,” he remembered, “That was a new experience for me. I took the plunge and toured Latin America with a bunch of Latin musicians, playing Latin beats.” His work, both on-stage and off-stage in this realm, resulted in some of the most interesting parts of his career – his collaborations with Veloso are particularly stunning.
But Byrne’s love for this venture doesn’t stem from how popular it was – he admitted that it wasn’t necessarily one of the best-selling parts of his career, but that didn’t matter. He considered it a great career success because of the breakthrough he made personally, musically and with a new subsection of fans.
He expected the tour to be “trial by fire,” anticipating that audiences would either “laugh [him] off the stage” or welcome him. Fortunately, it was the latter. “They welcomed me,” he remembered, “They liked it. They thought, ‘The punk rocker likes salsa. What is going on here?’”
Byrne had taken the plunge into a new area of music, following his interest in different genres and desire to work with new musicians, and his decision had paid off. Audiences were taken by him on-stage, and he forged relationships with a slew of Latin artists. And now, this remains one of the highlights of career, although it may be overshadowed by larger commercial successes.
