David Byrne

David Byrne (/bɜːrn/; born May 14, 1952) is an American musician, writer, visual artist, and filmmaker. He was a founding member and the principal songwriter, lead vocalist, and guitarist of the rock band Talking Heads.

Byrne was born in Dumbarton, Scotland and moved to the United States with his family as a child. He co-founded Talking Heads in 1975 in New York City. After releasing eight studio albums, including seven certified gold or platinum, Talking Heads disbanded in 1991.

Byrne has released solo recordings and worked with media including film, photography, opera, fiction, and non-fiction. He has collaborated with artists including Brian Eno, Fatboy Slim, X-Press 2, Ryuichi Sakamoto of Yellow Magic Orchestra, and St. Vincent. Byrne has received an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, a Special Tony Award, and a Golden Globe Award, and was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of Talking Heads.

David Byrne was born on May 14, 1952, in Dumbarton, Dunbartonshire, Scotland. Two years after his birth, the family moved to Canada, settling in Hamilton, Ontario. When Byrne was eight or nine years old they moved to Arbutus, Maryland, in the United States, where his father worked as an electronics engineer at Westinghouse Electric Corporation and his mother later became a teacher. Byrne grew up speaking with a Scottish accent but adopted an American one to fit in at school.

From a young age, he had a strong interest in music. His parents said that he would constantly play his phonograph from age three and he learned how to play the harmonica at age five. He was rejected from his middle school's choir because they said he was "off-key and too withdrawn". By high school, Byrne knew how to play the guitar, accordion, and violin. His father used his electronic engineering skills to modify a reel-to-reel tape recorder so that Byrne could make multitrack recordings.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.