David Byrne (; born 14 May 1952) is a Scottish-American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, actor, writer, music theorist, visual artist, and filmmaker. He was a founding member, principal songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist of the American new wave band Talking Heads.
Byrne has released solo recordings and worked with various media including film, photography, opera, fiction, and non-fiction. He has received an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, a Special Tony Award, and a Golden Globe Award, and he is an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of Talking Heads.
Early life and education
David Byrne was born on 14 May 1952 in Dumbarton, Dunbartonshire, Scotland, the elder of two children born to Tom (from Lambhill, Glasgow) and Emma Byrne. Byrne's father was Catholic and his mother Presbyterian. Two years after his birth, the family moved to Canada, settling in Hamilton, Ontario. The family left Scotland in part because there were few jobs requiring his father's engineering skills and in part because of the tensions in the extended family caused by his parents' interfaith marriage. When Byrne was eight or nine years old they moved to Arbutus, Maryland, in the United States, where his father worked as an electronics engineer at Westinghouse Electric Corporation and his mother later became a teacher. Byrne stated that he initially grew up speaking with a Scottish accent but adopted an American one in order to fit in at school. He later recalled "I felt like a bit of an outsider. But then I realized the world was made up of people who were all different. But we’re all here."
Before high school, Byrne already knew how to play the guitar, accordion, and violin. He was rejected from his middle school's choir because they said he was "off-key and too withdrawn". From a young age, he had a strong interest in music. His parents say that he would constantly play his phonograph from age three and he learned how to play the harmonica at age five. His father used his electrical engineering skills to modify a reel-to-reel tape recorder so that Byrne could make multitrack recordings.
Byrne graduated from Lansdowne High School in southwest Baltimore County, Maryland. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, during the 1970–71 term and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore during the 1971–72 term before dropping out.
Career
Early career: 1971–1974
He started his musical career in a high school band called Revelation; then between 1971 and 1972, he was one half of a duo named Bizadi with Marc Kehoe. Their repertoire consisted mostly of songs such as "April Showers", "96 Tears", "Dancing on the Ceiling" and Frank Sinatra songs. He returned to Providence in 1973 and formed a band called the Artistics with fellow RISD student Chris Frantz. The band dissolved in 1974. Byrne moved to New York City in May that year, and in September of that year, Frantz and his girlfriend Tina Weymouth followed suit. After Byrne and Frantz were unable to find a bass player in New York for nearly two years, Weymouth learned to play the bass guitar. While working day jobs in late 1974, they were contemplating a band.
Talking Heads: 1975–1991
By January 1975, Talking Heads were practicing and playing together, while still working normal day jobs. They founded the band Talking Heads and had their first gig in June.
In May 1976, Byrne quit his day job, and the three-piece band signed to Sire Records in November of that year. Byrne was the youngest member of the band. Multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison, previously of The Modern Lovers, joined the band in 1977. The band released eight studio albums to critical acclaim and commercial success. Four albums achieved gold status (exceeding 500,000 in sales) and two others were certified double-platinum (exceeding two million in sales). Talking Heads were pioneers of the new wave music scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s with popular and creative music videos on MTV.
In 1988, the band went into hiatus, but the hiatus was not announced until three years later, in 1991. Byrne pursued a solo career, and the band briefly reunited to record the single "Sax and Violins" in 1991 before again going into hiatus.
In 2002, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where they reunited to play three tracks, including "Psycho Killer" and "Burning Down the House".