David Byrne Presents: Here Lies Love musical inspirations
https://davidbyrne.com/radio/hllinspo

The immersive disco musical I wrote with Fatboy Slim is coming to Broadway (previews begin June 17th)! While there are a few non-dance music songs in the show, many of the songs were inspired by music that was usually heard in dance clubs. I didn’t go to dance clubs that much (Myself and the other Talking Heads had the records). I remember sometimes being able to see well known singers who had club hits performing their 1 song (or songs) on a platform while they were singing live to the backing track of their song. Kind of a karaoke show - but sung by the original artists. These were called “track acts”. I wondered to myself “DJs often talk about the arc of an evening- what if that arc were a real story, told by the songs sung by these track acts as the audience continued to dance?”

But what does this music FEEL like? To me the grooves are ecstatic, transcendent- we lose ourselves in the beats, the builds and the drops. I imagined this might be akin to how it must feel to be a person in a position of power- it’s heady, you never want to return to normal banal everyday existence (not while you’ve been to never never land). Maybe that’s one of the reasons I thought this kind of music might be perfect for this story.

-David Byrne

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