A colorful case of the mosaic of influences that is art.
“When a library is open, no matter its size or shape,” Bill Moyers wrote, “democracy is open, too.” A century and a half earlier, Thoreau extolled a different aspect of the library as a technology of thought, writing in his diary: “Those old books suggested a certain fertility … as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in.”
It was in a similar spirit that, in curating the 2015 Meltdown Festival at London’s Southbank Centre, beloved musician David Byrne decided to turn his personal book collection into a lending library. “I love a library. The idea of reading books for free didn’t kill the publishing business,” he writes in The Guardian, “on the contrary, it created nations of literate and passionate readers. Shared interests and the impulse to create.”
His impressively worldly library of more than 200 titles spans nearly every aspect of music — from technique to theory, mechanics to memoirs, instruments to interviews — as well as psychology, art, architecture, history, and copyright law.
A lifelong lover of reading, Byrne grew up in a small suburban town near Baltimore, where the library was his only access point to the wider world and books became his formative creative sandbox. I asked him about his earliest memory of a formative book he borrowed from that childhood library and he points to The Phantom Tollbooth. How apt that the 1961 classic contains the now-iconic map of The Kingdom of Wisdom, with its Mountains of Ignorance, Foothills of Confusion, and Sea of Knowledge — an perfect metaphor for how reading itself equips us with an invaluable compass for navigating the landscape of life.
In resonance with Umberto Eco’s concept of the “anti-library,” Byrne points out that he hasn’t read all the books in his library, but has bought each one with the intention of reading it one day — a practice the Japanese call tsudoku.
I’ve digitized the complete alphabetized list of books in Byrne’s lending library, sent to me in a photograph by Brain Pickings reader Ben Hart. What emerges is confirmation that great art is always a mosaic of vibrantly varied influences.
40 Watts from Nowhere: A Journey into Pirate Radio (public library) by Sue Carpenter
A divina comedia dos Mutantes (public library) by Carlos Calado
A Photographic Record: 1969–1980 (public library) by Mick Rock
A Thelonious Monk: Study Album (public library) by Lionel Grigson
A Whole Room for Music: A Short Guide to the Balfour Building Music Makers’ Gallery (public library) by Helene La Rue
Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (public library) by Brandon Labelle
Acoustics for Radio and Television Studios (public library) by Christopher Gilford
Africa Dances (public library) by Geoffrey Gorer
African Music: A People’s Art (public library) by Francis Bebey
African Rhythm and African Sensibility (public library) by John Miller Chernoff
Afro-American Folk Songs (public library) by H.E. Krehbiel
AfroPop! An Illustrated Guide to Contemporary African Music (public library) by Sean Barlow & Banning Eyre
All You Need to Know About the Music Business (public library) by Donald S. Passman
Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (public library) by Miguel Algarin & Bob Holman
An Illustrated Treasury of Songs (public library) by National Gallery of Art
And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (public library) by Studs Terkel
Arranged Marriage (public library) by Wallace Berman & Robert Watts
Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (public library) by Cristoph Cox & Daniel Warner
Austin City Limits: 35 Years in Photographs (public library) by Scott Newton & Terry Lickona
Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music (public library) by Deborah Pacini Hernandez
Bandalism: The Rock Group Survival Guide (public library) by Julian Ridgway
Beats of the Heart: Popular Music of the World (public library) by Jeremy Marre & Hannah Charlton
Best Music Writing 2001 (public library) by Nick Hornby & Ben Schafer
Best Music Writing 2002 (public library) by Jonathan Lethem & Paul Bresnick
Best Music Writing 2003 (public library) by Matt Groening & Paul Bresnick
Best Music Writing 2006 (public library) by Mary Gaitskill & Daphne Carr
Best Music Writing 2007 (public library) by Robert Christgau & Daphne Carr
Bicycle Diaries (public library) by David Byrne
Black Music of Two Worlds (public library) by John Storm Roberts
Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific (public library) by Heidi Carolyn Feidman
Blues Guitar: The Men Who Made the Music (public library) by Jas Obrecht
Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music that Seduced the World (public library) by Ruy Castro
Botsford Collection of Folk Songs Volume 1 (public library) by Florence Hudson Botsford
Botsford Collection of Folk Songs Volume 2 (public library) by Florence Hudson Botsford
Bound for Glory (public library) by Woody Guthrie
Bourbon Street Black: The New Orleans Black Jazzman (public library) by Jack V Buerkle & Danny Barker
Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship (public library) by Idelber Avelar & Christopher Dunn
Brutality Garden: Tropicalla and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (public library) by Christopher Dunn
Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise (public library) by David Rothenberg
But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (public library) by Geoff Dyer
Cancioneiro Vinicius De Moraes (public library) by Orfeu
Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (public library) by Mark Katz
Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley (public library) by Timothy White
Chambers (public library) by Alvin Lucier & Douglas Simon
Chinaberry Sidewalks: A Memoir (public library) by Rodney Crowell
Chris Stein/Negative: Me, Blondie and the Advent of Punk (public library) by Deborah Harry, Glenn O’Brien & Shepard Fairey
Clandestino: In Search of Manu Chao (public library) by Peter Culshaw
Clothes Music Boys (public library) by Viv Albertine
Cocinando! Fifty Years of Latin Cover Art (public library) by Pablo Yglesias
Conjunto (public library) by John Dyer
Conversations with Glenn Gould (public library) by Jonathan Cott
Conversing with Cage (public library) by Richard Kostelanetz
Copyrights & Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (public library) by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Dancing in Your Head: Jazz, Blues, Rock and Beyond (public library) by Gene Santoro
Desert Plants: Conversations with Twenty-Three American Musicians by Walter Zimmerman
Diccionario de Jazz Latino (public library) by Nat Chediak
Diccionario del Rock Latino (public library) by Nat Chediak
Driving Through Cuba: Rare Encounters in the Land of Sugar Cane and Revolution (public library) by Carlo Gebler
Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussion (public library) by Mickey Hart & Jay Stevens
Essays on Music (public library) by Theodor W. Adorno
Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (public library) by Michael Nyman
Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (public library) by Negativland
Fela Fela: This Bitch of a Life (public library) by Carlos Moore
Fetish & Fame: The 1997 MTV Video Music Awards by David Felton
Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (public library) by Stephen Sondheim
Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents (public library) by Bruno Nettl
Folk Song Style and Culture (public library) by Alan Lomax
Folk: The Essential Album Guide (public library) by Neal Walers & Brian Mansfield
Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (public library) by Iannis Xenakis
Fotografie in Musica (public library) by Guido Harari
Genesis of a Music (public library) by Harry Partch
Give my Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (public library) by B.H. Friedman
Gravikords, Whirlies, & Pyrophones: Experimental Musical Instruments (public library) by Bart Hopkin
Guia Esencial De La Salsa (public library) by Jose Manuel Gomez
Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning (public library) by Gary Marcus
(public library) by
Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity (public library) by Veit Erlmann
Here Come the Regulars: How to Run a Record Label on a Shoestring Budget (public library) by Ian Anderson
He Stopped Loving Her Today: George Jones, Billy Sherrill and the Pretty-Much Totally True Story of the Making of the Greatest Country Record of All Time (public library) by Jack Isenhour
Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music and Graffiti (public library) by Steven Hager
Hit Men (public library) by Frederic Dannen
Hitsville: The 100 Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazines 1954–1968 (public library) by Alan Betrock
Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (public library) by Ellen Dissanayake
Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (public library) by Alice Echols
How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond (public library) by John Powell
Hungry for Heaven: Rock and Roll and the Search for Redemption (public library) by Steve Turner
I Have Seen the End of the World and it Looks Like This (public library) by Bob Schneider
I’ll Take You There Mavis Staples: The Staple Songers, and the March Up Freedom’s Highway (public library) by Greg Kot
In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (public library) by George Prochnik
Indian Music (public library) by B. Chaitanya Deva
It Ain’t Easy: Long John Baldry and the Birth of the British Blues (public library) by Paul Myers
Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (public library) by William P. Malm
Javanese Gamelan (public library) by Jennifer Lindsay
Jazz (public library) by William Claxton
Knitting Music (public library) by Michael Dorf
La Traviata: In Full Score (public library) by Giuseppe Verdi
Laurie Anderson (public library) by John Howell
Leon Geico: Cronica de un Sueno by Oscar Finkelstein
Lexicon of Musical Invective (public library) by Nicolas Slonimsky
(public library) by
Light Strings: Impressions of the Guitar (public library) by Ralph Gibson & Andy Summers
Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music (public library) by Eric Weisbard
Listening Through the Noise: the Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (public library) by Joanna Demers
Listen to This (public library) by Alex Ross
Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981–2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany (public library) by Stephen Sondheim
Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Music Made New in New York City in the ’70s (public library) by Will Hermes
Love in Vain: The Life and Legend of Robert Johnson (public library) by Allen Greenberg
Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture (public library) by Tim Lawrence
Low (public library) by Hugo Wilcken
Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-dirty in Seventies New York (public library) by James Wolcott
Macumba: The Teachings of Maria-Jose, Mother of the Gods (public library) by Serge Bramly
Mango Mambo (public library) by Adal
Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song: MPB 1965–1985 (public library) by Charles Perrone
Max’s Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll (public library) by Steven Kasher
Me, the Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James and the Shondells (public library) by Tommy James
Miles: The Autobiography (public library) by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe
Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an imaginary Soul Superstar (public library) by Dori Hadar
Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (public library) by Alan Lomax
Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture (public library) by Thurston Moore
Music (public library) by Paul Bowles
Music and Communication (public library) by Terence McLaughlin
Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters (public library) by Bob W. White
Music and the Brain: Studies in the Neurology of Music (public library) by MacDonald Critchley & R. A. Henson
Music and the Mind (public library) by Anthony Storr
Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession (public library) by Gilbert Rouget
Music Cultures of the Pacific, The Near East, and Asia (public library) by William P. Malm
(public library) by
Music in Cuba (public library) by Alejo Carpentier
Music, Language and the Brain (public library) by Aniruddh D. Patel
Musica Cubana Del Areyto a la Nueva Trova (public library) by Dr. Cristobal Diaz Ayala
Musical Instruments of the World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia with More than 4,000 Original Drawings (public library) by Ruth Midgely
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (public library) by Oliver Sacks
My Music (public library) by Susan D Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi & Charles Keil
New York Noise: Art and Music from the New York Underground 1978-88 (public library) by Stuart Baker
Noise: A Human History of Sound & Listening (public library) by David Hendy
Noise: The Political Economy of Music (public library) by Jacques Attali
Notations (public library) by John Cage
Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (public library) by David Toop
On Sonic Art (public library) by Trevor Wishart
Opera 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Opera (public library) by Fred Plotkin
Patronizing The Arts (public library) by Marjorie Garber
Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (public library) by Greg Milner
Pet Shop Boys: Literally (public library) by Chris Heath
Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey (public library) by Peter Manuel
The Power of Music: Pioneering Discoveries in the Science of Song (public library) by Elena Mannes
Presenting Celia Cruz (public library) by Alexis Rodriguez-Duarte
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (public library) by Lester Bangs
Queens of Havana: The Amazing Adventures of the Legendary Anacaona, Cuba’s First All-Girl Dance Band (public library) by Alicia Castro
Recordando a Tito Puente: El Rey del Timbal (public library) by Steven Loza
Reflections on Macedonian Music: Past and Future (public library) by Dimitrije Buzarovski
Remembering the Future (public library) by Luciano Berio
Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording Music and Its Effect on Music (public library) by Michael Chanan
Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties (public library) by Ian Macdonald
Rhythm & Blues in New Orleans (public library) by John Broven
Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here to Pay: The History of Politics in the Music Industry (public library) by Steve Shapple & Reebee Garofalo
Rock Archives (public library) by Michael Ochs
Rock Images: 1970–1990 (public library) by Claude Gassian
Rock Lives: Profiles and Interviews (public library) by Timothy White
Salsa Guidebook for Piano & Ensemble (public library) by Rebeca Mauleon
Salsa: The Rhythm of Latin Music (public library) by Gerard Sheller
Salsiology: Afro-Cuban Music and the Evolution of Salsa in New York City (public library) by Vernon W. Boggs
Samba (public library) by Alma Guillermoprieto
Sonic Transports:New Frontiers in Our Music (public library) by Cole Gagne
Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (public library) by Steve Goodman
Souled American: How Black Music Transformed White Culture (public library) by Kevin Phinney
Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (public library) by Frances Dyson
Soundings (public library) by Neuberger Museum
South to Louisiana: The Music of the Cajun Bayous (public library) by John Broven
Spaces Speak, Are You Listening: Experiencing Aural Architecture (public library) by Barry Blesser & Linda-Ruth Salter
Spirit Rising: My Life, My Music (public library) by Angelique Kidjo
Starmaking Machinery: The Odyssey of an Album (public library) by Geoffrey Stokes
Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer (public library) by Jonathan Cott
Stolen Moments: Conversations with Contemporary Musicians (public library) by Tom Schnabel
Stomping the Blues (public library) by Albert Murray
Tango: The Art History of Love (public library) by Robert Farris Thompson
Text-Sound Texts (public library) by Richard Kostelanetz
The ABCs of Rock (public library) by Melissa Duke Mooney
The Agony of Modern Music (public library) by Henry Pleasants
The Anthropology of Music (public library) by Alan P. Merriam
The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help (public library) by Amanda Palmer
The Beatles: Recording Sessions (public library) by Mark Lewisohn
The Book of Drugs: A Memoir (public library) by Mike Dougherty
The Brazilian Sounds: Samba, Bossa Nova, and the Popular Music of Brazil (public library) by Chris McGowan & Ricardo Pessanha
The Faber Book of Pop (public library) by Hanif Kureishi & Jon Savage
The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (public library) by Bernie Krause
The Human Voice (public library) by Jean Cocteau
The Kachamba Brothers’ Band: A Study of Neo-Traditional Music in Malawi (public library) by Gerhard Kubik
The Last Holiday: A Memoir (public library) by Gil Scott-Heron
The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States (public library) by John Storm Roberts
The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock (public library) by Charles White
The Merge Records Companion: A Visual Discography of the First Twenty Years (public library) by Merge Records
The Music Instinct (public library) by Philip Ball
The Music of Brazil (public library) by David P. Appleby
The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and the National Identity in Brazil (public library) by Hermano Vianna
The New Woman Poems: A Tribute to Mercedes Sosa (public library) by Ne?stor Rodri?guez Lacore?n
The Performer Prepares (public library) by Robert Caldwell
The Rational and Social Foundations of Music (public library) by Max Weber
The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl (public library) by Trevor Schoonmake
The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (public library) by Evan Eisenberg
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (public library) by Alex Ross
The Rolling Stone Interviews: The 1980s (public library) by Various
The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (public library) by Greil Marcus
The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World (public library) by Trevor Cox
The Sun and the Drum: African Roots in Jamaican Folk Tradition (public library) by Leonard Barrett
The Thinking Ear (public library) by R. Murray Schafer
The Traditional Music of Japan (public library) by Kishibe Shigeo
The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art (public library) by Tim Blanning
The Veil of Silence (public library) by Djura
The Wilco Book (public library) by Dan Nadel
This Business of Music: The Definitive Guide to the Music Industry (public library) by M. William Krasilovsky & Sidney Shemel
This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of Human Obsession (public library) by Daniel J. Levitin
Through Music to Self (public library) by Peter Michael Hamel
West African Rhythms for Drumset (public library) by Royal Hartigan
What Good are the Arts? (public library) by John Carey
White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960’s (public library) by Joe Boyd
Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History 1955–Present (public library) by Gail Buckland
(public library) by
Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical Languages (public library) by John Shepard, Phil Virden, Graham Vulliamy, Trevor Wishart
Why is This Country Dancing: A One-Man Samba to the Beat of Brazil (public library) by John Krich
Woody Guthrie: A Life (public library) by Joe Klein
The Rough Guide to World Music: Latin and North America, Caribbean, India, Asia, and Pacific: An A-Z of the Music, Musicians and Discs (public library) by Simon Broughton & Mark Ellingham
The Rough Guide to World Music: Salsa to Soukous, Cajun to Calypso (public library) by Simon Broughton, Mark Ellingham, David Muddyman & Richard Trillo
World: The Essential Album Guide (public library) by Adam McGovern
Yakety Yak: The Midnight Confessions and Revelations of Thirty-Seven Rock Stars and Legends (public library) by Scott Cohen
Complement with Byrne on how music and creativity work, then revisit the reading lists of Gabriel García Márquez, Leo Tolstoy, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Carl Sagan, Alan Turing, and longtime Byrne collaborator Brian Eno.
Donating = Loving
Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
♥ $7 / month♥ $3 / month♥ $10 / month♥ $25 / month
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount.
<img align="left" style="margin: 3px 7px 3px 0" src="http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/themes/BrainPickings/images/email.pn