The album that gave David Byrne “hope” in the music industry
Every musician reaches a juncture where it seems as though every musical possibility has been explored. While it’s tempting to stick to familiar tunes that please the crowd, the notion of creating something entirely novel often appears elusive in an industry seemingly geared towards catering to the audience’s basic expectations. However, David Byrne, known for his creative ventures both with Talking Heads and beyond, confessed that Radiohead’s album In Rainbows reignited his belief in the transformative power of music.
Then again, to say that everything that Byrne has ever done has been rock music would be a huge generalisation. Throughout the history of Talking Heads, Byrne was looking to touch on any kind of genre that popped into his head, usually using the studio as an instrument on its own when making albums like Fear of Music and Remain in Light.
Byrne was also looking to work on whatever he thought the next big thing would be, either earning himself accolades for videos like ‘Once in a Lifetime’ or creating some of the greatest live shows anyone had ever seen captured in the movie Stop Making Sense. While the latter half of the band saw Byrne making amateur inroads into different genres, one of his experiments eventually gave Radiohead their name as well.
After trying their hand at being a dollar-store version of a grunge band, Radiohead didn’t truly find their sound until a few albums in, eventually creating a massive art-rock statement on OK Computer. Since everyone expected the band to make that kind of synthetic style of rock for the rest of their lives, Thom Yorke thought the best way for the band to thrive would be to leave everything they knew behind.
Going in the polar opposite direction for the album Kid A, the band would continue to experiment with the way they made music as well as the way they released their music. Having the opportunity to be away from EMI for the first time since their debut, the band’s 2007 album In Rainbows would be one of the first pay-what-you-want releases in rock history, as the band encouraged listeners to pay as much or as little as they wanted to.
When inducting the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Byrne thought that the band’s results from In Rainbows helped him look at the music industry in a different way, saying, “They took the radical leap of selling the record for the price of ‘pay what you wish’…It turned out that most people did pay the going rate. Some people actually paid more. It showed trust in the audience. In this age when there’s so little trust in the world, it was a nice social experiment. I thought it was very hopeful”.
Radiohead would only continue to expand their strange approaches to album releases as the years went on. For the albums The King of Limbs and A Moon Shaped Pool, the band would spend most of their time working in the studio and only telling fans about an upcoming album a few months ahead of the album’s actual release. From genre leaps to wild ways of manoeuvring their way through the music industry, Radiohead have followed in Byrne’s footsteps in having their own voice in how their music is released as well as how it is presented.
