Happy 60th Birthday to 3QD friend David Byrne

by S. Abbas Raza

David is one of the rare rock stars who continues to innovate and surprise in several artistic fields decades after his rise to fame as lead singer of the Talking Heads in the 1970s. Today, even as he enters his seventh decade he shows no signs of slowing down. Last week I got the following email from him:

Last year I did some songs for a film by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (check out his previous film Il Divo). This new film, This Must Be The Place, stars Sean Penn as a kind of present-day Robert Smith (The Cure). I wrote the music, Will Oldham wrote the lyrics and Michael Brunnock sang the songs. In the film, these songs appear on a demo CD that the Sean Penn character is handed. Now, the “Italian Academy Awards” have awarded us for best score and best original song!

If you want to get it, the soundtrack is available now on Amazon and iTunes and for people in the UK, there is also a vinyl collectors edition available.

I constantly listen to David's collaboration with Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, and you can hear it too, here.

Five years ago I wrote about the amazing experience of seeing David perform live at Carnegie Hall. You can read that here.

We hope that David will continue to enrich our lives in his particular and quirky ways for decades more to come!

[Photo from last.fm.]