One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you're allowed to fail.
Interpretation
Small audiences provide a safe space for failure and growth.
David Byrne highlights the importance of performing in intimate settings where artists can experiment and learn from their mistakes without the pressure of large audiences. This experience fosters personal and professional growth, enabling artists to refine their craft and build confidence before facing larger crowds.
In practice
In a workshop about performance art, you could say, 'As David Byrne said, one of the benefits of playing to small audiences is that you're allowed to fail, which is where growth happens.'
Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.
When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.
I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You're not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.
You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.
Real sadness is such an all-encompassing intense thing that it takes you out of your humdrum existence. If you can still function, you want to show it while it's peaking. So when people tell you to cheer up, it's not always the best thing.
I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.
If you want to establish an international presence you can't do so from New York. You need the consecration of Paris.
I'm not sure I knew what an entrepreneur was when I was ten, but I knew that starting little businesses and trying to sell greeting cards or newspapers door-to-door or just vending machine kind of thing is.. there's just something very intriguing to me about that.
On a personal note, I think it won't be until after I've retired that I'm fully aware of what I've done or what I've gone on to achieve in my career.
At a startup, it's hard enough to get a single thing right, much less a whole bunch of things. Especially if the things you are trying to do are not only dissimilar but actively impede each other.
The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.
I bought a company in the mid-'90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I've made lots of dumb decisions. That's part of the game.
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