David Byrne (2) (1952–)

This wasn't quite what I was expecting — the title made me imagine a travel book or a piece of cycle advocacy, but actually it's more of a semi-random collection of short essays about cities, the people who live there, and the arts, inspired by Byrne's travels to different parts of the world in the course of his work as a musician. When he travels, he likes to take a folding bike with him and use that to explore, but the cycling per se is only a rather minor part of the story. The format of the book is said to be loosely modelled on W G Sebald, with a mix of first-hand impressions, rambling philosophical sidetracks, and black-and-white photos, but there's a lot more shooting from the hip and a lot less evidence of weeks spent researching stuff in libraries than you would get in an actual Sebald book. Which is fair enough: I don't think anyone would be buying this book expecting to get heavyweight academic delvings.

Byrne is clearly an intelligent, thoughtful person, and his situation in life allows him to meet interesting people in the course of his travels (assuming that you accept artists, gallery-owners and musicians as "interesting people"...), so this makes for a pleasant, lively read, but I don't think you will find anything very earth-shattering here, unless you are someone who loves motor cars and thinks of the USA as the model of perfect urban planning (in which case it might annoy you a little...). A good short-attention-span book to read on a journey or in a hospital waiting-room, probably.… (altro)

Idiosyncratic take on how he feels about music, his experiences in the music industry, his ideas about what makes music special etc. It talks a good amount about his Talking Heads/solo experience but it's not like a musical autobiography type thing, although you probably won't be too interested if you don't care much about his musical career. It also doesn't talk about music theory (or only tiny bits) and almost all of it is pretty accessible if you don't know much about music, although it's also not gonna teach you much theoretical stuff. In general I enjoyed it and it gave me stuff to think about although every so often he gives out a fact I'm not sure is accurate and there's a few big generalisations about "African music" and stuff.… (altro)