David Byrne has released a new playlist inspired by one of his favourite touring rituals: going for a bike ride to clear his head.
In a note accompanying the playlist, the Talking Heads frontman revealed that the entire band travels with folding bicycles while on tour, and that cycling has become one of his ways of resetting between shows.
“The whole band has folding bikes that we travel with — if I have an afternoon off I’ll often go for a ride to clear my head, and if I’m on my own and it’s a secure path or not a busy road… I’ll listen to this playlist,” Byrne wrote. “What I think of as pop music is broadly defined. Some songs are, by consensus, mainstream, but even some of those often push at the edges. Others take the format, length and shape of pop songs, but to my ears they don’t sound anything like the ones considered more mainstream. That said, they’re all equal in my book, I don’t think of any of them as inside or outside - as I’ve seen those definitions change with plenty of exceptions that prove the rules are meant to be broken.”
The playlist reflects Byrne’s famously eclectic taste in music and is an extension of Byrne’s well-documented love of cycling. In 2009, he published Bicycle Diaries, a book chronicling his travels through cities around the world and reflecting on urban life, creativity, and transportation.
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