“I tell you what I see when I listen to ‘Blind’. I see civil strife, a ‘Sammy And Rosie Get Laid’ kind of scenario, and someone badly hurt. A woman looking out of a window is scared. I use the word ‘blind’ to mean indifference. I don’t think it takes place in New York. I think it takes place in South America or some place.”David Byrne (295)

“A Southern white-trash scene with a little bit of doom and destruction on the edge.”David Byrne (295)

“The songs ‘Heaven’ and ‘Mind’ are set in parties and bars, places where people get together, except in one of ’em the party is in someone’s mind and they want it to stop. Eventually they decide they like it.”David Byrne (296)

“One title, ‘Drugs’ is a psychedelic song. I like those ’60s numbers where they try and describe the experience…They’re stupid. There’s a big resurgence of acid in Paris apparently. The people from the disco where we played go on huge acid binges, hiring trains and stuff. That’s a little intense for me.”David Byrne (296)

“But ‘Psycho Killer’ was the first song I actually ever wrote. What inspired it was…Well, Alice Cooper was really big then and I just thought it’d be interesting to do a song in something approaching that mock-ghoulish vein he was pumping but give certain twists. Like, Alice Cooper had all these safety gauges worked out so that it wouldn’t connect with anything remotely dangerous. It was all ‘It’s OK folks, it’s only a show’. I just liked the idea of writing a song that was more…real. Even ‘Psycho Killer’ kind of has an opposite in ‘Life During Wartime’. In ‘Psycho Killer’ the guy singing it is flipping out from an internal crack-up. He’s hysterical, but his hysteria is all to do with this fuse that’s blown in his brain. The guy I depict in ‘Life During Wartime’ is a very rational type.”David Byrne (297)

“When I wrote that, I was thinking not so much of a World War Three thing so much as a terrorist attack – a Baadar-Meinhof situation, that would have escalated into pretty much civil war. And the narrator is just very logically running down a list of things – materialistic stuff that suddenly means nothing when a real state of emergency is declared.”David Byrne (297)

“A song about urban guerrillas from the point of view of their daily lives instead of the point of view of their politics.”David Byrne (1259)

“It’s another one about ecstatic release I guess, but starting from the mundane, a girl in the backyard in the suburbs. I was imagining a place where I grew up [in Baltimore – Ed]. A girl I knew in high school told me that she used to take LSD and go and lay in the grass by the chocolate factory. Somehow that image seemed fitting, the junk food factory and this young girl tripping her brains out gazing at the sky. But it wasn’t a drugs song at all and I don’t think people took it that way. I think it gives the impression of a spiritual or emotional experience, instantaneous and unprovoked. The sublime can come out of the ridiculous.”David Byrne (1108)

“It’s this little ditty about how there’s no order and no plan and no scheme to life and death and it doesn’t mean anything, but it’s alright.”David Byrne (1108)

“I wanted to write a sad song that didn’t describe the relationship. To me, it describes how you feel when you feel very sad.”David Byrne (1259)