#Bicycle diaries american utopia full#

We’d go on little road trips, usually in Canada, to parks and things like that. My formative travel memories are: with my parents. There’s a thrill of being able to say “Ha-ha! I beat the system here!” The same thing happened in Istanbul, where traffic is atrocious. In Rome, where hardly anybody is riding a bike, you realize, “This is perfect!” There’s all these twisty little streets (and a couple of hills) and you realize the traffic is all snarled, but you can just zoom through and get around. But it’s when you’re in other places that you have a sense of freedom you realize is unique to cyclists.

Some of the most cyclist-friendly cities are: Amsterdam or Copenhagen, where everyone’s on bikes. I’m sure know how they’re going to solve these issues-like the way everybody’s going to dump them at the train station at 5:00 p.m. You can find them on your phone and go, oh, there’s one right there and just unlock it with your phone. Milan had two competing versions of the Chinese park-anywhere bike startups (Mobike and OFO). If I don’t have my bike: I’ll try a city’s bike-share program, to test whether it works or not. Not all of them, but a lot of them, and then thinking to myself, people here can’t afford this. I remember riding a bike around all sorts of towns before the housing crisis, and just seeing all these houses being built-developments just mushrooming out, everywhere. I see things from street level that are different from just reading the papers. Maybe go to a museum, or do other things. When I have down time while traveling: I’ll explore the town on the bicycle. I woke up in the middle of the night and rolled out of the bed, and boom-onto the floor.

I remember one night at a hotel in Brussels the bed was really high. One side effect of traveling a lot is: waking up and not remembering exactly where you are. We slot them in the bus where the luggage goes. Some of the other people on the tour will have similar ones. The bike I’m taking with me on tour is a Tern Node D8, which is pretty much a full-size bike but folds in half. The other thing I always bring is: a bicycle. I love re-living the dinner from the day before. I put it in the little containers to stash in the fridge and in the mornings zap it up for a nice breakfast. It probably wouldn’t work for traditional travelers, but because there’s a microwave on the bus and a little fridge, I can take leftovers from dinner. When I go on tour I always bring: Tupperware. And within, like, half an hour, boom, boom, boom, boom: They’ve set it up and made a whole kitchen. Often two people, who would have a stove and an oven inside a road case. On European tours, some bands would often travel with their own cooks.

#Bicycle diaries american utopia full#

So you’ve kind of gotten a full night’s sleep. You often arrive in a town in the morning, having slept on the bus. It’s actually more efficient than flying, unless you own your own plane. One hopes we participate, and that we don’t just watch from the hotel balcony-that we’re part of it.” Only tourists, but the view is nice,” which sums up his engaged approach to life and travel.

Byrne sings, “We’re only tourists in this life. In the lead single, “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” Mr. Travel of a more allegorical nature is a recurring motif on the new album. His observations on these initiatives gave rise to a TED Talk-like presentation, which he’s given recently in New York, London, Amsterdam and Berlin. Byrne’s worldly expeditions informed another recent project, called “Reasons to be Cheerful,” a collection of pioneering initiatives in wide-ranging fields, from transportation to energy production, all cataloged on a website of the same name. His cycling habit led to his 2009 book “Bicycle Diaries,” a collection of essays drawn from his two-wheeled excursions in cities such as Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Pittsburgh and New York, where he lives, as well as Manila, in the Philippines, where he found inspiration for “Here Lies Love,” the 2010 disco-musical about Imelda Marcos he created in collaboration with Fatboy Slim. Byrne has racked up countless miles, and he has the projects to show for it. Though this is his first solo record since 2004, these last 14 years haven’t been idle ones. 17-to promote his new album, “American Utopia,” and he’s bringing his bike. Byrne has just embarked on a world tour-taking him to more than 90 cities, from Santiago, Chile, this Friday, to Brooklyn, N.Y., on Sept. THIS SPRING and summer, you may notice a familiar-looking figure pedaling along your local cycling path, and you may ask yourself: “Is that David Byrne, the former frontman of Talking Heads?” It could well be.