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David Byrne

$45

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An intimate, enigmatic glimpse into the mind of the legendary musician and internationally bestselling author of How Music Works. With a new introduction by the author.

$45

In stock

ISBN – 9781786899507
Publisher – Canongate Books
Format – Hardback
Publication Date – 05/12/2019
Dimensions – 238mm X 187mm
Categories – Music

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David Byrne
How Music Works
How Music Works is David Byrne’s remarkable and buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. In it he explores how profoundly music is shaped by its time and place, and he explains how the advent of recording technology in the twentieth century forever changed our relationship to playing, performing, and listening to music.

Acting as historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, he searches for patterns–and shows how those patterns have affected his own work over the years with Talking Heads and his many collaborators, from Brian Eno to Caetano Veloso. Byrne sees music as part of a larger, almost Darwinian pattern of adaptations and responses to its cultural and physical context. His range is panoptic, taking us from Wagnerian opera houses to African villages, from his earliest high schoolreel-to-reel recordings to his latest work in a home music studio (and all the big studios in between).

Touching on the joy, the physics, and even the business of making music,How Music Works is a brainy, irresistible adventure and an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.

$37

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Bicycle Diaries


…an engaging book: part diary, part manifesto. The Guardian

A round-the-world bicycle tour with one of the most original artists of our day.

Urban bicycling has become more popular than ever as recession-strapped, climate-conscious city dwellers reinvent basic transportation. In this wide-ranging memoir, artist/musician and co-founder of Talking Heads David Byrne–who has relied on a bike to get around New York City since the early 1980s–relates his adventures as he pedals through and engages with some of the world’s major cities. From Buenos Aires to Berlin, he meets a range of people both famous and ordinary, shares his thoughts on art, fashion, music, globalization, and the ways that many places are becoming more bike-friendly. Bicycle Diaries is an adventure on two wheels conveyed with humor, curiosity, and humanity.

$25

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American Utopia


From former Talking Heads frontman and multimedia visionary David Byrne and revered bestselling author, illustrator, and artist Maira Kalman–an inspiring celebration in words and art of the connections between us all.

Don’t miss the Spike Lee film of the Broadway hit American Utopia–on HBO.
A Beat Most Anticipated Graphic Novel of Fall 2020

A joyful collaboration between old friends David Byrne and Maira Kalman, American Utopia offers readers an antidote to cynicism, bursting with pathos, humanism, and hope–featuring his words and lyrics brought to life with more than 150 of her colorful paintings.

The text is drawn from David Byrne’s American Utopia, which has become a hit Broadway show and is now a film from Spike Lee on HBO. The four-color artwork, by Maira Kalman, which she created for the Broadway show’s curtain, is composed of small moments, expressions, gestures, and interactions that together offer a portrait of daily life and coexistence.

With their creative talents combined, American Utopia is a salvo for kindness and a call for jubilation, a reminder to sing, dance, and waste not a moment. Beautifully designed and edited by Alex Kalman, American Utopia is a balm for the soul from two of the world’s most extraordinary artists.

$53

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