{"id":624649,"date":"2026-10-08T19:42:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T19:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/624649\/"},"modified":"2026-10-08T19:42:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T19:42:12","slug":"david-byrne-and-daniel-pemberton-made-a-song-using-weird-elon-musk-quotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/624649\/","title":{"rendered":"David Byrne and Daniel Pemberton Made a Song Using Weird Elon Musk Quotes"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Byrne<\/a> and composer Daniel Pemberton are sharing a new collaborative song they made with a prompt that would make your creative writing professor happy. The lyrics to \u201cLet Me Sell You a Dream,\u201d their original track written for the upcoming Alex Gibney-directed documentary Musk, were created solely from Elon Musk quotes. (Byrne previously used this songwriting method on 2010\u2019s Here Lies Love<\/a>, where he similarly repurposed statements by Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos.) Listen to the song below.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be too easy and probably not as much fun to overtly criticize Musk,\u201d said Byrne. \u201cBetter, I thought, to try and get inside his head a little bit, to use phrases he himself has used in interviews and statements, and let the character in the song be the one who describes himself.\u201d The Talking Heads<\/a> frontman also revealed that he arranged the lyrics and melody to \u201cLet Me Sell You a Dream\u201d before watching the movie, but accepted the offer because he was familiar with both Pemberton and Gibney\u2019s work and thought it \u201csounded like fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Musk is directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, who also helmed Going Clear and The Inventor. The tech mogul declined to be interviewed for the documentary, so Gibney utilized Musk\u2019s own words as recorded in podcasts, previous interviews, and outtakes from documentaries to shape his film about the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter). It\u2019s nearly four hours long and also features original interviews with Musk\u2019s ex-partners, journalists, engineers, and others. Musk hits theaters nationwide on October 16.<\/p>\n

Bleecker Street, the film\u2019s distributor, ran into an unsettling problem when trying to promote the documentary last month. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok refused to run the Musk trailer as paid advertising, instead flagging it as \u201cpolitical\u201d content. After the ban picked up press<\/a> coverage<\/a>, the social media companies reversed course<\/a> and claimed it was \u201can error.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read Stephen Thomas Erlewine\u2019s review of Byrne\u2019s newest album, Who Is the Sky?<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Byrne and composer Daniel Pemberton are sharing a new collaborative song they made with a prompt that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[48,430,156,593,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-624649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-audio","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}