Some day he'll probably collate his writings into a book and render all this obsolete. In fact you can fashion one yourself from your printer at work/uni/Kinko's when no one's looking. But until then pixels will have to do. I'm talking about the online journal of David Byrne.

For the luddites, David Byrne was the singer/main songwriter of seminal 80s band Talking Heads. He wrote some shit hot songs that you'll know, even you don't. They're on the radio all the time and have permeated popular culture indelibly. More to the point, they're on "classic" radio stations fairly constantly (even I have to enter a petrol station or shopping centre sometimes people) - while still getting played at house parties and covered by hipster bands like Arcade Fire 20 years on. Not to mention influencing an ever-changing new legion of musicians. (Wikipedia states that 'Burning Down The House' has been covered by Weird Al Yankovic, Tom Jones and The Cardigans, Bonnie Raitt, DJ Tiga and er, The Vienna Boys Choir. How's that for genre (and generation) hopping? Fun Fact: Cut from the 80s kids movie The Goonies,  was a scene where Data kills an octopus by throwing a stereo playing that song into its mouth.)

Since Byrne left Talking Heads he's carved out a formidable solo career. Apart from extensions of his 'pop' oeuvre his repertoire includes film scores, theatre compositions, spoken word, various art projects (including his infamous 'PowerPoint' presentation, which he brought to the Adelaide Arts Festival in 2006, along with his play about Imelda Marcos featuring a musical collaboration with Fatboy Slim), video pieces, and installations. Thats just a fraction of his output but you get the idea of the ground - both high and low -  that the man is interested in. Add to that a global network of friends, intelligentsia, associates and extended invitations, combined with a (presumably) reasonably inexhaustible income/means of travel and an inquisitive, erudite and fascinated mind, and you have fairly intriguing means for a blog.

While Byrne has a multitude of performance based musings peppered throughout his journal, the most fascinating to me are his entries regarding travel. The modus operandi in his approach to travel is echoed here in his art bio: "Like his film and musical projects, his artwork is often described as elevating the mundane or the banal to the level of art, creating icons out of everyday materials to find the sacred in the profane." That is, Byrne can make the pattern on a plane seat sound fascinating. Considering he places far more interesting locales in front of his eyes than aeroplane cloth, his reflections are complex and addictive.

A recent post started: "I’m in Dallas — or more accurately, Richardson, a silicon suburb north of the city — to meet with David Hanson, a maker of realistic (i.e. human) looking robots." While there Byrne expects to record a song (in English as well as Spanish no less) so that he might assist Hanson in building a life-like robot with humanistic facial gestures. Sounds fun enough but he also takes time in the same post to describe the "awe-inspiring" network of highways out of Texas Airport as an interconnected "ballet", muses on his hotel's "temple" style symmetry and function and takes in the beauty of a giant windowless warehouse. All complete with photo's.

Over the years my imagination has fluttered with his ruminations on the bike lanes of Berlin, the discoteques of Brazil and the volcanic landscapes of New Zealand. The prehistoric tar pits that still lie in the heart of the Los Angeles CBD. The description of the tricked-out "Jeepneys" on his trip to the Phillipines while researching Imelda Marcos. The poor acoustics in the theatres of South America. Or the time a woman came up to him before a show in Portland, Or. and amazingly explained that she was THE high-school friend Byrne long-ago referenced in the narrative of the classic Talking Heads song 'And She Was'.

His writing straddles two worlds, one of the naive and wide-eyed inquisitor - as we would like to feel we are - and one of the well-connected, experienced and learned celebrity - as...we would like to be. Interwoven with all of the above are dinners with friends, gig reviews and record industry reflections, as seen in his article for Wired magazine titled "David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists - and Megastars" containing interviews with Thom Yorke, Brian Eno and Mac McCaughan of Merge Records/Superchunk.

All this is nothing new however. His blog long ago found widespread acclaim and attracts a cult following. It's easy to see why. It's fun, funny, inspirational and...well, educational. BoingBoing.net once put it: "This is one of the things I love most about blogs: getting to shoulder-surf thinkers who make me smarter." But maybe Filter is more on the money when they say: "David Byrne, just by being David Byrne, has simply made everything a little bit less like everything else..."

http://journal.davidbyrne.com