David Byrne: Why the Medium Matters, Revisited

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of StoryTelling. Welcome. This week, we’re revisiting a conversation from the FoST Podcast archives with one of the most curious and inventive artists of our time, David Byrne. Best known as the co-founder and lead singer of Talking Heads. David has spent his career moving fluidly across music, theater, film, visual art, writing, and immersive experience, constantly experimenting with new ways to connect ideas with audiences. That curiosity is at the heart of his new book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, which explores why transformative ideas across art, science, and technology can sometimes disappear only to be rediscovered years or even centuries later. It felt like the perfect moment to return to this conversation, originally recorded as David was preparing to open his immersive theatrical experience, Theater of the Mind, which is currently playing at the Goodman Theater in Chicago.

We talk about the surprising overlap between art and science, why some stories need to be experienced rather than just observed, the importance of getting outside your creative comfort zone, and how shared experiences can actually change the way we see ourselves and the world. Please enjoy my conversation with the incomparable David Byrne.

David Byrne, I have been a lifelong fan of yours. It’s such an honor to be able to sit and have a conversation with you today. Welcome.

DAVID BYRNE:

Thank you. Good to see you again. We’ve crossed paths a number of times and yeah, good to see you again.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Well, I’m really excited to learn more about this new piece that you’re working on called Theater of the Mind. Could you tell us a little bit about it?

DAVID BYRNE:

I was just thinking it’s very appropriate for a future of storytelling because it’s trying to imagine how do you tell a story in an immersive experience like this. And there’s different ways of doing it. What it is, is a series of about seven rooms that an audience of 16 people at a time are led through by a guide. And in each room they have a sensory experience based on some science experiment, a lot of them kind of perceptual or neuroscience experiments. And we’ve kind of integrated a story into that.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

And what was the inspiration for such a unique project?

DAVID BYRNE:

The inspiration for this came many years ago, I was reading a science magazine and I mentioned an experiment that was done by a lab in Stockholm, the Urson Lab. They did an experiment and published a paper called Being Barbie in which you were embodied in the body of a doll. It wasn’t a Barbie doll. The bodies of Barbies and Kens are sufficiently distant from what a human is that it’s hard to be embodied in that. But I was fascinated by this and I though, “Oh, I would love to experience that.” And I bet other people would too. So I kind of wrote to them cold and asked them, “Would you consider setting up your lab, this experiment in say an art gallery in New York?” I think they may have though I was crazy or just some nutcase or whatever. And so that didn’t go anywhere, but I’ve kind of persisted and thus began a very long process.

And we did workshops and rehearsals and test versions and this and that. We had to sometimes try things a number of times before the science worked, before the kind of sensory and perceptual disruption was really sufficiently strong enough. Eventually we realized we needed a story. We needed something to pull you through and like, “Why are we doing this? Why are we going from one room to another? Where is this leading? What is this about?” And in one of the rehearsals, I’ll just ramble on for a minute, we had different guides in each room because it was a lot of script to memorize. But one actor says, “I think I can do the whole thing.” She did that and by the end of that run, I immediately thought, “Oh, this is about this character.” And it seems to be that we’ve fallen into a place where it starts with either old age or death of this character, and then they kind of relive their life backwards until they’re kind of an infant and that’s where the audience is embodied in a doll and the guide has a conversation with themself as a child.

And I though there is the structure and now let’s find incidents and anecdotes and some emotional pull through, something that has to be solved and worked out, something where the guide, this character has to have some kind of realization, something that changes their view of things in the course of going through this.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

You have a very sophisticated understanding of story and narrative. You clearly are coming at this as if you’re a playwright or a novelist or… I mean, when you first described this to me, I though, oh, it’s a series of science experiments. That doesn’t sound so engaging or like a full evening of a theatrical experience, but clearly you brought a storyteller’s eye to making this.

DAVID BYRNE:

We realized it was absolutely necessary to have a story, to have an emotional arc that would pull you through there. We experimented with different things, but now we’re kind of polishing that, but that made a huge difference. I mean, I think it would be fun to just go through a bunch of rooms and have these kind of disruptive perceptual experiences, but you wouldn’t necessarily then have an emotional experience.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Right. It would be a perceptual fun house, but not a story, a narrative arc, a personal journey. Yeah.

DAVID BYRNE:

Exactly.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I’m curious about your thinking on the relationship between science and art. Here’s an artistic piece that’s origins are in experiments in labs. Often people think of science and art almost in conflict, like these are two very different sides of the brain or two very different ways of looking at the world. Do you feel that way?

DAVID BYRNE:

No, I feel like there’s a lot of overlap, a lot of similarities. Yes, in order to put on a show or write a play or do any of these things, there’s a lot of rigorous work that needs to go in of testing and then seeing what works and what doesn’t work. And the same thing happens with science. Someone has an inspiration and they have to test it out and see what works and then kind of imagine, well, what if I did it this way or what if I did it that way? We though that’s very much underappreciated how much creativity there is in that world.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I also think that they ask similar big questions about the world and existence.

DAVID BYRNE:

Exactly. They might be focusing on kind of details of perception or psychology or cognition, but what they’re really getting at is yes, who are we and how do we imagine ourselves? How do we see ourselves in the world and how do we make decisions? All these kinds of things.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Yeah. I often have been struck by that too, that when you get to the heart of it, both artists and scientists are asking those similar kind of big questions about existence and who we are and why we’re here. In your book, How Music Works, which by the way, I’ve loved reading, I was struck by that opening sort of theory that you present, which is that art is created by the context. Well, first, could you explain that, what you meant by that?

DAVID BYRNE:

I used architecture and acoustics as an example. Having played, performed in a lot of places, I realized that the sound, the acoustics, the sound and the kind of social space in certain rooms is more conducive to certain kinds of music than others. A beautiful concert hall like Carnegie Hall is not at all acoustically suitable for kind of loud rhythmic music, rock and roll or funk or whatever. It’s a very reverberant hall. So it really suits a certain kind of classical music and it actually enhances that kind of classical music. And the same is true of other things. I noticed the small clubs that I grew up playing in, whether it’s CBGBs or I use an example of I think Trixie’s in Nashville and a country and western bar. Those places are very conducive to loud music of whatever sort, but the sound is very clear.

So you can hear the vocals, you can hear all the various instruments and things like that. So I began to realize that, oh, not only are there certain rooms that are conducive to certain kinds of music, in a certain kind of way they will nurture that kind of music and they will help the creation of that kind of music. People who write songs or perform them or whatever will naturally be drawn to the kind of rooms where their creations sound the best. So I though, oh, this is an example of the context, in this case the architectural and acoustic context, shaping the content.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

That makes a ton of sense to, I think anybody who’s worked in a professional creative context, the economic structures, the distribution structures, the tools that are available, all of that helps to form the kind of work that’s made. So my question, since I agree with you about that idea, what is the context that’s helping to shape Theater of the Mind?

DAVID BYRNE:

Wow. Probably I’m inspired by some other immersive things that I’ve seen. Punchdrunk has done some and a bunch of other organizations that have done different ones where you go through a series of rooms. Sometimes you wander freely, like in Meow Wolf or something like that. Sometimes you wander freely and if there’s a story, it’s kind of buried in there somewhere.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

To be discovered, yeah.

DAVID BYRNE:

Yeah, to be discovered. So it becomes a thing of discovery by the audience members and sometimes that’s rewarding and sometimes not so much, but that concept of taking over often like an old industrial space or some warehouse or something like that is not uncommon now. How that gets realized is a variety of ways of doing it.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I was going to propose a answer to the question I gave you about context forming this work and wondered what you would think of this, which is that we’re in a world where so much has been digitized, where so much of our content and entertainment and information comes to us mediated through screens and devices and it’s all digitized that maybe that was one of the, if you will, cultural contexts that would encourage the kind of work where it’s 16 people in a small intimate space at a time having a very tactile and in real life experience.

DAVID BYRNE:

I agree that it seems as one tendency evolves and becomes more popular, more pervasive, its opposite seems to then get fostered at the same time. As a lot of our entertainment and experiences are kind of mediated by screens, there’s this kind of unconscious longing for personal, actual, in real life experiences. And

We’re kind of drawing on that. I also feel that for these kind of perceptual and kind of philosophical implications that they have for these experiences, it’s very different experiencing it for yourself than being told about it or watching it on a screen or seeing a character in a play or movie go through some of these things. That’s one thing and you can kind of learn from that, but to have it actually happen to you is a completely different order of understanding. It’s not an understanding like I read about this. It’s this, this happened to me. I know this because it happened to me.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I’ve had conversations with Felix Barrett, who’s the creator of PunchDrunk, the immersive theater company you referenced a minute ago. And when he talks about what he hopes people say when they come out of a punch drunk show is “you’ll never believe what happened to me last night,” not “what I saw,” not “let me tell you about that thing I watched.” It was what happened to me.

DAVID BYRNE:

Exactly. I think it’s very important that like that, like he described, part of the whole experience is that people talk about it afterwards amongst themselves. There is a kind of brewery across the complex from where we are. So I think we’re going to encourage people, go over there and they’ll give you a discount if you’ve seen the show and that’ll encourage people to then talk about, well, what happened to you? What was your experience? What did you understand about this? And what did you feel about that character? I think that’s where the understanding happens there almost as much as it does in the actual space.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I have this friend in London who’s big into LARPing, Matt Locke, and he told me this expression called throthing, which is when they would come out of a live action role playing game and then they would sit in the pub and have a pint and over the throth of the beer, they would describe their adventure. And in the description, they make it real and it sort of gets solidified for themselves as well as for others. So I always love that term throthing.

DAVID BYRNE:

They don’t have rabies.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

This whole conversation makes me think of a little bit of the kind of work that you’re doing in Theater of the Mind is to theater kind of the way the novel was to literature, to writing. The novel was this form that for the first time let people see from inside some other character’s experience to really know what was going on inside their mind, have that kind of access, if you will, window into someone else’s thoughts. And I feel like Theater of the Mind is in a way doing that for your guests, but at this time it’s themselves.

DAVID BYRNE:

Yes, we hope so. The audience in a conventional theater thing, you watch a character change in some point along the line in the story. They have a realization or something. In this case, that happens, but we also hope that it’s the audience that changes as well. And as your friend said about LARPing, we do a thing where we give the audience members false names. We give them new names, names that don’t match who they look like or what they think they are. We don’t take it too far. It’s not like a LARP where they’re expected to wear costumes or have a backstory or anything like that, but we do it a little bit. We give them a little bit of a backstory and the guide interacts with them as if the guide knew them at an earlier stage in the guide’s life.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

That sounds great. I imagine people will love getting to play a new role to put on a new costume.

DAVID BYRNE:

My hope is that they’ll see how easy it is to kind of be malleable and flexible with their identity.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So I’m also just so interested in how your thinking about audience has evolved and changed, or has it changed? Do you have a different thought about how you connect with or your relationship with the audience?

DAVID BYRNE:

A little bit. I recently finished a run of a show on Broadway where the format is a concert, but there’s a lot of talking. I do a lot of talking directly to the audience. And I realized this in some ways has more in common with standup comics than it does with conventional theater because I’m addressing the audience directly and they know that I’m addressing them directly. And if they react a certain way, if they laugh at one thing or if they have another kind of reaction to something I say, I can respond to that. I’m not so tied to a script. There is a script, but I’m not so tied to it that I just ignore whatever their reaction is. There’s a kind of interplay between the audience and myself. And I’ve realized that, oh, this is a different way of doing this.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I feel like I’ve seen you playing with this issue of relationship to audience over time. I had the pleasure of going to see Here Lies Love and realize that that was very different than a traditional theater structure or concert hall because the audience was up and moving and the performance was around them. Are you consciously trying to kind of find new ways to connect or create work for audiences?

DAVID BYRNE:

Yes. I think that’s been something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. With Here Lies Love, I originally imagined that it would be a kind of musical and theatrical experience that took place in a disco, but by the time I kind of was able to realize it, a lot of these big warehouse discos in New York and elsewhere had kind of closed up where they’d been subdivided into kind of champagne rooms and VIP rooms and everything else. So doing a show in those kind of spaces was no longer feasible, but then I realized that, oh, we could work with a theater company and turn a theatrical space into a disco. Instead of turning a disco into a theater, you could turn a theater into a disco. And that’s what we did. And the audience, half the audience is on the dance floor and the other half are kind of up in the balconies watching.

But there’s a real story. Again, it’s the challenge is can you tell a story this way? And do people get emotionally involved in the story? And they do. They do.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

On the one hand, I’m so interested in the conversation about the context, the architectural context.That’s one of the things that I’ve found myself in lots of conversations these days with immersive storytellers about how we don’t have a venue designed to encourage this work. We’re struggling. The proscenium theaters aren’t right. An empty warehouse is a little empty. A custom, like a beautiful old piece of signature architecture, like the kinds of places that Punchdrunk build site specific work for are very hard to come by and have all sorts of code and other challenges. This world of immersive storytelling, experiential embodied storytelling is struggling because we don’t have the ideal venues for this work yet.

DAVID BYRNE:

Just like the idea of the music context and the acoustics and the architecture, there isn’t a kind of architectural context for this that exists. People are looking, as you said, for warehouses or old schools or old office buildings or whatever. And often that works, but there isn’t kind of a set way to do it. There isn’t a network of such places in different cities.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

The chain of movie theaters for movies. Yeah.

DAVID BYRNE:

Yeah. There isn’t a thing like that where it could move from place to place.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s a real challenge. I’m also wanting to pick back up on the note you made about people being able to have an emotional experience in this kind of storytelling because it’s embodied, because you’re trying to use their opportunity to move, to feel, to taste, to have sensorial experience, to heighten the emotions of the story, to give them something that’s more powerful. How do you think about building that kind of language for embodied experience in storytelling?

DAVID BYRNE:

I’ve seen it work in Here Lies Love. There’s a point in the story where you have the audience cheering the Marcoses on as they win the election to become president and first lady of the Philippines. Now the audience, I suspect, already knows where this story’s going. They know that it’s going to be a bad end for them. And what? The audience is swept up in the kind of excitement and joy and the music and the dancing and everything like that. And they show their support and they’re all cheering. And then as happened with the Philippine people, they feel the rug gets pulled out from under them at some point and they feel like they’ve been tricked. But to me, that’s great because the audience then emotionally went along for the ride, didn’t just watch it happening to someone else, it happened to them. And then so they then have the catharsis at the end where they see behind the curtain.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

All the more powerfully, yeah. I read that your father was an electrical engineer. Is that right?

DAVID BYRNE:

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. He worked at Westinghouse, but working on their defense contracts, not on washers and dryers.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

And that he helped to hack an audio recorder for you when you were young so you could use it to overdub.

DAVID BYRNE:

Yes, exactly. Yes. We had a little tape recorder at home. I don’t know why, but people sometimes had those then. Yeah. He tinkered with it in a way that allowed me to record what was called sound on sound, similar to what Les Paul did years before. You could play along with yourself. It was a tedious process. If you made a mistake, you couldn’t go back and undo it, but it was a lot of fun to do.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Well, I just was taken by that as an early example of you being an early adopter of technology and being somebody who was open to making it work to your creative ends. Would you consider yourself someone who’s done that throughout your career?

DAVID BYRNE:

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was in the air too. There were other popular musicians who were kind of experimenting with sounds and technology and different things. So it was something like, “Oh, this is an okay thing to do. This kind of curiosity and experimentation is something to be encouraged.”

CHARLIE MELCHER:

And what about being so comfortable working in different forms? I mean, you’re best known as a musician, but here we’re talking about immersive theater piece. You’ve done other types of theater, photography, writing, other visual arts. You’ve been so fearless in working across forms. When we were kids, most people were sort of taught you do one thing and specialize in that, and if you’re lucky, you can make a career in it. You didn’t get that note.

DAVID BYRNE:

I guess not. I’ve been very lucky that way. Not everything succeeded that well. My original ambition was to be a kind of fine artist and show in galleries and things like that. And I started doing that after I had some success as a popular musician. I guess it was maybe in the 90s. And I realized that I was kind of facing an uphill battle because my reputation as a musician, people were a little bit suspicious of the artwork that I was doing. And maybe the artwork wasn’t quite good enough either, but eventually, so not everything succeeded, but I always learned from whatever it was in that way. I come from a background where there was this kind of idea that different things you want to express or say or realize, there’s an appropriate medium for each one. This kind of idea might be best expressed in a book.

And just because you’re trained as a photographer, maybe the way to deal with this idea is in a book or a newspaper article or whatever. So you’re obliged then to learn a new skill to some extent or work with people who can help you do that. But yes, it sort of means that you have to really think about what medium is the best for this thing that I want to say, this thing I want to do.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I kind of feel like maybe we share this, which is that also taking on new things is truly one of the ways to learn about the world. It’s one of the ways that you become engaged, you become focused, maybe you’re a little scared even because you’ve never done this before and maybe it won’t work out so well, but it’s an incredible way to learn to take on a new medium, a new form and set yourself a goal of creating something in it.

DAVID BYRNE:

Yeah, it’s invigorating. It’s invigorating. I learned pretty early on that getting a little bit out of your comfort zone is usually a pretty good thing. Maybe not too far out, but push the edge of it. Yeah.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Yeah. Little fear can be a healthy thing.

DAVID BYRNE:

Exactly. Exactly.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

You mentioned before the engaging with the audience in America in utopia, and you had this conversation, this dialogue, but one of the things that I thought was so powerful was that moment when you put the light on 20% of the audience and you turned the audience into a infographic to literally have them physically embody a message you had about how a functioning democracy works only if people vote.

DAVID BYRNE:

I realized that yes, it was possible to visualize. It wasn’t just a bunch of data or numbers that I was spouting on stage that I could kind of show people this is what it looks like and that the audience can envision that too. When they see that the 20% of the people who are lit up in the audience represent the 20% who vote in local elections and that they’re deciding the future of everyone else in the theater, it kind of strikes home. It hits home and people realize, oh, this is not a good thing.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Right. Who are those 20% and why do they get the attention?

DAVID BYRNE:

Why do they get to tell me and my children what to do? Yeah.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Well, I also see that as a really creative way of communicating a certain set of values and a message about perhaps how we can use art to create a better world. Certainly I feel like you’ve been so consistent in using your soapbox, the benefit that you have from being a popular artist to help share ideas about a more equitable and just and healthy society. And is that part of everything that you do? Is that an important part for you of the work that you continue to do and have always done?

DAVID BYRNE:

I don’t know if I’ve always done it, but at some point I realized that to be a citizen, you have a civic responsibility and it has nothing to do with me being a popular entertainer. It has to do with just being a citizen. So I try not to get on my soap box and take too much advantage of that. I want to maybe tell people how I feel about something or represent an idea, the voting idea, without being too dogmatic about it.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I do feel like we’re facing such challenges as a country and as a planet, and it sometimes can be so overwhelming and depressing and you can start to feel a little hopeless. But then I see you do something wonderfully joyful and creative, getting a group of people embodying something or sharing a message in the context of a really exciting and fun evening and realize that you’re bringing people together, that actually through your art, you’re modeling or enabling a kind of healing or shared experiences that are bonding as opposed to, let’s say, media, which is polarizing in general, and it gives me hope.

DAVID BYRNE:

Thank you. I realized that the American Utopia Show, you see a band that’s kind of very diverse as far as race and gender and everything, all working together, making music together really and doing it very well. And so you don’t have to say anything in some ways. I don’t have to say anything. The evidence is right there in front of the audience and you don’t have to tell them what you’re seeing or that this is possible because they’re seeing it for themselves.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

And in your book, How Music Works, you also make that point that there are certain kinds of, or that music and dance are those things that tend to get people in harmony together, actually moving together and create sort of social bonding. Whereas in a world of echo chambers and isolation, we’re not having as many experiences that are getting us in harmony with each other. And I do think people say, “How do we solve this?” And I can certainly attest, I’ve been to concerts where all of a sudden I’m dancing with thousands of people all at once and some of them very different than me. And we leave with a feeling of shared humanity as opposed to, “This is mine and that’s yours and don’t…”

DAVID BYRNE:

Exactly. Those kinds of experiences, especially when it involves rhythm and movement together with other people, it allows us to let go of our little selves for a minute and partake of a larger group, a larger social group and a larger community, which it’s kind of an ecstatic feeling. It’s not a feeling you can have just by yourself. You have to do it with other people.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Pine and Gilmore. They wrote this book, The Experience Economy.

DAVID BYRNE:

I might have heard it. Was this quite a number of years ago?

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Quite a number of years ago.

DAVID BYRNE:

Yes.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I’m a little bit aware of it. It’s sort of an economic theory actually that our economics evolved from products to services and from services to experiences.

And in fact, they anticipated this growth of the experience economy, of the kinds of projects that we were talking about, immersive theater, LARPing, a hunger for real experience in the world. But after they wrote that book, they then sort of realized that actually experiences could be commodified also and that what people were really looking for were experiences that could become transformative, where it wasn’t just to go as an experience junkie from one cool thing that you got to do to another, but actually you could become changed for the better from the experience, that it would actually have this sort of lasting and permanent life. So for example, a college education is a transformative experience. You go to college, you come out and your life is actually substantively different afterwards. And I think that from what I understand of Theater of the Mind, it is an experiential theater, but it has aspirations or possibly could lead somebody to think about the world very differently afterwards.

DAVID BYRNE:

That’s exactly the hope that the audience comes out with a slightly different perception, different way of looking at themselves and the world. I can’t verify that yet. We haven’t opened yet, but that is definitely what we’re hoping happens.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Well, I very much look forward to coming and experiencing it. And if there’s anyone who I would trust to put myself into an experience and have them hopefully let me see the world a little differently, it would be you, David. So thank you for doing that. Thank you for being with us today on the FoST Podcast. And I can’t wait to experience more of the joy that comes through the work that you’ve done over the years and will continue to do. So thank you.

DAVID BYRNE:

Thank you. It’s nice to be invited to be on the podcast. Thank you.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Once again, I’m Charlie Melcher and this has been The FoST Podcast. Thanks for joining me. If you enjoy immersive experiences or are curious about how storytelling is evolving and changing in our modern world, you are going to love my recently published book entitled The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming the World. The book itself is an immersive experience. I hope you’ll pick up a copy. You can purchase it online wherever books are sold. The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong and story on.