![]() ![]() Just instinctively, I started saving things that seemed vaguely helpful to me. Trump was elected, I, like a lot of other people, was feeling anger and despair reading the news every day. Anyway, a couple of years ago, before Mr. You’re almost done, and then you realize, “Ah!” You get the perspective on it. Sometimes you don’t realize what you are doing is about until you’re getting near the finish. Which came first - the album or the lecture series?Ībout the same time. I really enjoyed the Reasons to Be Cheerful lecture on your YouTube channel, which is a confrontation of sorts. You watch out! You will be confronted at some point. I’m going to come into the boardroom, or where you’re making these kind of decisions. That’s me saying I’m going to come and confront you people. That’s making me think of the lyrics in “Gasoline and Dirty Sheets”: “I will come down off the stage / The marketplace and the shopping mall / Into the house - the rooms of war / Look at me now and recall.” That’s not to say it’s not a useful thing, but we might want to be aware when it’s pushing aside some of our better, more generous, altruistic kinds of behaviors. I’m kind of paraphrasing this in the worst way, but is that people sometimes have good instincts but money can sometimes crowd out their better instincts. When money enters the equation, they feel like they’re not giving of themselves of their own free will they’re being bought. But I read a book some months ago called The Moral Economy, and one of the things that writer pointed out is that people will volunteer to help out in the community, but if you pay them, they won’t. I may have called the record American Utopia, but I’m not going to propose a utopia without money or specifics like, “Okay, we’re going to get rid of all money and we’re going to have sex with whoever we want to sleep with.” No, I’m not going to deal with those kind of specifics. How do you feel about money? Could you imagine a system without it? Often you realize after you’ve written something, “Ohhh, this is what it’s about. I don’t write with that kind of intention, I don’t write all “I have to say something about economics” or something like that. I realize, yes, I drop those references in there, but hardly anyone else has picked up on that. There are lots of references to money on the record that underline the problematic ways in which it shapes our lives. ![]() As he points out in the lecture, “Everything is connected.” For example, when Vancouver decided to treat drug addiction as a health issue, rather than a criminal one, it resulted in fewer overdoses and lower crime rates. His blogs on everything from Trump to gun control have nailed his personal colors to the mast, and now there’s his lecture series–cum-website, Reasons to Be Cheerful, in which he gathers instances of cities and communities that are experimenting with radical sociopolitical initiatives to great success. That’s not to say there aren’t some delectably oddball moments on American Utopia, his first solo studio album in 14 years - there are plenty - but that his projects outside of music increasingly provide the context for it. Now he seems more interested in what constitutes good sense in society. With the band Talking Heads, David Byrne spent the early years of his career using his art to embrace the nonsensical. ![]()
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