Yeah. It's a profitable horse for him to be beating. One thing I like about this one is this:

Salon: The chapters on lyric writing are especially interesting in that way. You’ll sing gibberish over a melody until you strike on the right sounds for the music, because the way a word sounds and rings in a song carries its own emotional impact.

Byrne: I think so!

Salon: The way the word sounds sometimes carries more feeling than what the word itself means.

Byrne: I’m working on a song now, a collaboration with a group, and I’ve been asked to write a melody and lyrics. I almost got it and I think it needs some refining. Again, I’m starting off with singing this gibberish and if I refine it a little more it’s kind of like, “Yes that’s it.” If you can listen to it without letting your rational faculties say, “What is it about?” And if you just listen to it as kind of an emotional, verbal utterance, then I think a lot of the emotion is already in there. You just have to kind of not ruin it with the lyrics.

I'm glad to see this idea from someone as ensconced in the public consciousness as David Byrne, because it's something I subscribe to and it's something that has often guided the way that I write. I think it's important for readers of poetry or people interested in giving poetry a try, to understand that "meaning" is not always "the point" of a given song or a given poem, which is not to say that those songs or poems are nonsense, or that people are wrong for looking for meaning. I feel like people often come away from reading poems feeling like they didn't get it because they were so focused on accomplishing or finishing something that they forgot to experience the poem as a deliberately engineered experience.