David Byrne on the influence of Arthur Russell: “I had to completely reorient my thinking”
It’s rare to find an artist who is open to experimenting with the eclectic and the avant-garde, but 1970s New York birthed two of them in Arthur Russell and David Byrne. The former was a cellist who experimented across electronic production, while the latter demonstrated his creative prowess in Talking Heads and as a soloist.
Byrne and Russell were contemporaries in the music scene of the 1970s – the cellist was even considered to join Talking Heads in 1976. Instead of committing to the project, Russell instead contributed horn arrangements to some of their early work. Byrne once reflected on Russell’s influence in a digitised version of the original EPK for Arthur Russell’s Another Thought, which was released posthumously in 1994.
As Byrne recalls it, “Talking Heads was just getting started. I had just moved here, and at one point, he did some horn arrangements for a couple of our songs, and they were peculiar horn arrangements. I had to completely reorient my thinking, and I found that that was often the case with Arthur.”
Before he moved to New York, Russell had studied contemporary composition and Indian classical. When he relocated to the city that never sleeps, he continued this training at the Manhattan School of Music while also attending classes in electronic music at Colombia University. Along the way, he had picked up an eclectic taste that spanned countless genres, which bled into his own work.
This was one of many things Byrne admired about his peer, as he shared: “He seemed to have such a wide range of musical interests that at one point he would do something that would seem very avant-garde, or whatever word you want to use, and the next minute he would say ‘What I really wanna do is sound like ABBA’.”
Russell had no desire to appear cool and, through that indifference, was able to redefine the word. Byrne suggests that his interests seemed “somewhat incompatible” but that, after a while, “You would realise that he was bringing strands of various things together.”
His openness to all genres was instrumental in the sculpting of his unique sound. The cellist encouraged Byrne to appreciate music that he would usually “write off as being just commercial”, including Italian pop music. Byrne, again, was encouraged to reorient his thinking.
It’s not hard to see how Russell’s influence persisted on Byrne – as Talking Heads progressed, they embraced the influence of genres such as afrobeat and funk, following in Russell’s footsteps to bring various strands of music together. The frontman also seems to have embraced that some commercially-friendly art can also be cool – in the mid-2000s, he even collaborated with Fatboy Slim.
The long-standing influence of Russell on contemporary music doesn’t stop at Byrne, given that Kanye West has sampled his work, he inspired the name of James Blake’s label, and Devonte Hynes named him as an early influence. The cellist’s impact can still be felt across music, proving the value of embracing experimentation and rejecting the pressure to be cool.
