David Byrne

David Byrne (born May 14, 1952, in Dumbarton, Scotland, raised in the US) is a musician, visual artist, and writer best known as the co-founder and frontman of Talking Heads, one of the defining bands of New York's late-1970s art-rock and new wave scene. With Talking Heads he helped fuse punk-era nervous energy with funk rhythms, African polyrhythms, and avant-garde art sensibilities, a fusion crystallized on landmark albums like Remain in Light, made with longtime collaborator Brian Eno.

Since the band's dissolution, Byrne has built a prolific and genre-roaming solo career, moving fluidly between rock, electronic, and Latin- and world-music-influenced sound. He co-founded the Luaka Bop record label in 1988 to spotlight international and left-field music, and has continued to collaborate widely, including a full album with St. Vincent (Love This Giant) and ongoing work with Eno. His stage productions, notably the Broadway show American Utopia, are celebrated for their inventive, highly choreographed presentation of music as performance art.

Byrne is also a noted author, having written How Music Works (2012), a wide-ranging examination of how music is created, distributed, and experienced. Across five decades he has remained a restless experimenter, equally comfortable writing angular, anxious pop songs and expansive, joy-driven arrangements, and is widely regarded as one of the most consistently inventive figures to emerge from American art-rock.