David Byrne turns Elon Musk’s own words into a proto-punk song on “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” the Talking Heads singer’s contribution to the Alex Gibney-directed Musk documentary, out Friday.
Byrne teamed up with the film’s composer Daniel Pemberton for the track, which finds the singer arranging Musk’s proclamations from speeches and interviews into abstract lyricism. “Now I’m running human and imitation mode / I’m a chill normal dude / I just have to keep going,” Byrne sings. “Let me sell you a dream / Do you think I’m insane? / I eat a glass sandwich / I eat them every day.”
He adds on the bridge, “Multi-planet exploration / I’m a human emulation / I’m a total simulation.”
“A thrill to collaborate with Pemberton and get invited to do this as a fan of Gibney’s films,” Byrne said in a statement. “I asked for good quotes from the Martian, and found more of them online. I’m sure he loves dropping these wild statements, and those became the lyrics. All his own words. No editorializing. Straight from the man’s mouth to mine.”
“I was thrilled when David agreed to write (with our composer Daniel Pemberton) and perform the final song in the film,” Gibney added. “I am a huge fan of his. My wife and I were at the Pantages for the filming of Stop Making Sense, so I sensed that he would find a musical way into what the film is trying to say. And he did. ‘Let Me Sell You a Dream’ is kick-ass. And, in writing the lyrics, David dug deep into the sayings of Musk himself to get to ‘extremely hard core,’ foot-tapping sardonic poetry.”
As Variety notes, “Let Me Sell You a Dream” enters Byrne into a Best Original Song Oscars race that’s already fielding Taylor Swift’s “I Knew It, I Knew You.” However, Byrne already has an Academy Award in his possession, having won Best Original Score (with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su) for The Last Emperor in 1988; the singer is an Emmy shy of an EGOT, as Seth Meyers mentioned while introducing Byrne to Late Night on Thursday:
