David Byrne 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 “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” 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’s Here Lies Love, where he similarly repurposed statements by Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos.) Listen to the song below.
“It would be too easy and probably not as much fun to overtly criticize Musk,” said Byrne. “Better, 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.” The Talking Heads frontman also revealed that he arranged the lyrics and melody to “Let Me Sell You a Dream” before watching the movie, but accepted the offer because he was familiar with both Pemberton and Gibney’s work and thought it “sounded like fun.”
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’s 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’s nearly four hours long and also features original interviews with Musk’s ex-partners, journalists, engineers, and others. Musk hits theaters nationwide on October 16.
Bleecker Street, the film’s 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 “political” content. After the ban picked up press coverage, the social media companies reversed course and claimed it was “an error.”
Read Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s review of Byrne’s newest album, Who Is the Sky?.
