SAN DIEGO — Before he became an invaluable multi-instrumental wizard on tours with The Killers, Flaming Lips, Childish Gambino, Lorde, Vampire Weekend and — currently — David Byrne, Ray Suen was a fresh-faced violinist in the San Diego Youth Symphony. Looking back, only now does he realize how pivotal his orchestral experiences turned out to be.

“San Diego Youth Symphony was the first organization to take me on tour and I’ve been reflecting on that a lot,” Suen said. “This summer I was in Prague and Budapest on David’s tour and I realized the last time I had been there was as a 12-year-old with the San Diego Youth Symphony.

“It was such an eye-opening experience for me to have gone there then — and to have gone back now with David on his tour. It wasn’t lost on me that the seed of having a dream of getting to travel and play music for a living started in San Diego. The people I played with and studied with there showed me the places music can take you.”

Music has indeed taken Suen here, there and nearly everywhere.

For this interview, the 2007 UC San Diego graduate was speaking on a Zoom call in between his mid-August concerts with Byrne in Osaka, Japan, and Seoul, South Korea. The world tour by the veteran solo star and former leader of Talking Heads includes a Thursday night show at San Diego State University’s Cal Coast Open Air Theatre that sold out in a near instant.

The SDSU concert will be followed by Friday and Saturday performances at the nearly 18,000-capacity Hollywood Bowl and multiple concerts in Mexico City and New York. But playing to large audiences is nothing new for Suen, 41. He may have set a record for the most performances with the most artists at the annual Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, which typically attracts more than 100,000 attendees per day.

Suen was 24 when he made his Coachella debut in 2009 — in the headlining slot — as a touring member of The Killers. Ten years later, in 2019, he was back on Coachella’s main stage — again in the headlining slot — as a key member of Childish Gambino’s band.

In between those performances, Suen played at Coachella in 2010 with Mariachi El Bronx, in 2012 with Gambino and in 2017 with New Zealand-bred songstress Lorde. He has returned to the festival twice since then, playing with Vampire Weekend in 2024 and with Byrne this year.

As a result of Coachella expanding to a two-weekend format in 2012, with the same lineup featured each weekend, Suen has appeared at the festival a total of 12 times with six different artists. An avid music fan with extremely diverse musical tastes, he chuckled when asked if he has ever attended Coachella in an non-performing capacity.

“I had never attended before playing there with The Killers,” said Suen, who performed at nearly a dozen festivals this summer alone with Byrne. He played at many more over the years with Gambino, Lorde, The Killers and Vampire Weekend.

“With The Killers, we headlined the main stage at night,” he continued. “And the next year when I was there with Mariachi El Bronx, we went on at 11 in the morning, in a tent! The only people who were there to hear us were super hung over. It was a very different experience, but it was still super rewarding.”

Film scores and Metallica

A quest for different musical experiences has been a constant for Suen, whose recording credits include albums by Lorde, Gambino, Mariachi El Bronx, Madness, Khalid, Kamsi Washington and more.

He also composed some of the music for the 2020 feature film, “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” and the entire score for the 2024 film, “The Thicket.” Suen performed on the 2021 Grammy Awards and American Music Awards telecasts with country singer Mickey Guyton, for whom he played guitar and pedal-steel guitar.

A Delaware native, Suen lived in Philadelphia, Taiwan, Los Angeles and Houston before moving to San Diego in 1993, at the age of 8. That was five years after he began taking classical violin lessons.

By the time he was 11, Suen was studying here at the California Institute of Music. He joined the San Diego Youth Symphony a year later, followed by North County’s Civic Youth Orchestra when he started high school.

“Those experiences with the youth symphony and the music camp my violin teacher, Michael Tseitlin — who is still teaching at the California Institute of Music — ran was when I first came in contact with other people my age who were practicing so much more than I was,” Suen said.

“These were 14- and 15-year-old kids who were already studying at Juilliard. They made it clear to me I didn’t have what it takes to be a concert violinist. Those guys were practicing 10 hours a day! I was practicing four hours a day. I tried my hardest, but I couldn’t get past six hours a day.

“So, I was like: ‘Well, what do I do? What am I supposed to do?’ But at the same time, one of my roommates at that camp, played me the Metallica live album with the San Francisco Symphony. I did not know that was a thing that was possible, and I was like: ‘Oh, you can do that. You can take your music and change it when you play it live by doing it with an orchestra’.”

Psychology degree helfpul

Despite not practicing 10 hours a day, Suen was gifted enough that he became a principal violinist in the La Jolla Symphony while he was attending UCSD. With one foot in classical, one foot in rock — and a growing interest in jazz, bluegrass and other styles — he embraced as much music as he could.

Before long, Suen was concurrently playing with singer-songwriter Joanie Mendenhall and then in the San Diego indie-rock band Exfriends — which also featured Mendenhall — the swing-happy Hot Club of San Diego, and other groups.

“Ray and I had some things in common which bonded us quickly,” said Mendenhall, who is now a music teacher and is working on new music. “We both had the nerdy classical training background and we both were on that very socially acceptable, high-achiever path, trying to figure out how to get off that ride without messing up our lives too badly.

“I first heard him play at a block party when he was still a teenager, and he was so good I asked him to record with me. Ray was a stunning violinist and guitarist, with a super creative mind, who was in the process of discovering his own artistic abilities. His talent was huge. His artistic ambition was huge. It was a special time…”

Suen graduated in 2007 from UCSD, where he majored in psychology and minored in music. Those two pursuits of study have intertwined for him, at least in a manner.

“Psychology has given me an appreciation and sense of wonder for all the different ways people can experience and feel music,” he said, “ways that are different from mine.”

Suen’s two principal music teachers at UCSD were contrabass great and composer Mark Dresser and keyboardist, saxophonist and Grammy Award-winning producer Kamau Kenyatta.

“I do remember Ray,” Dresser said. He was very driven, very musical. I did anticipate that he would do something in the field. I’m very happy to learn he has a career and is doing high-level work!”

A Los Angeles resident since 2010, Suen is now better able to evaluate his time in San Diego from afar through the prism of time and experience.

He specifically referenced a photo — which he provided for this article — that was taken here at the 2007 Street Scene festival and shows him with this writer with Otis “O” Barthoulameu, the San Diego indie-rock legend who died in 2023 and strongly encouraged Suen’s musical pursuits.

O was a key mentor

In fact, Suen’s performance at Street Scene with the San Diego band Louis XIV, with which he toured as the opening act for The Killers, was a direct result of O recommending him for the gig. O did so by telling the members of Louis XIV that Suen was perhaps the only violinist in town who could single-handedly fill the role of the 30-piece, Electric Light Orchestra-inspired string section featured on Louis XIV’s then-upcoming new album.

“They gave me three or four songs to learn,” Suen, then 22, said in a 2007 San Diego Union-Tribune interview. “Once they saw I could pick things up quickly, they gave me 10 to 15 more songs. We rehearsed about five times, and we hit the road early this month. It’s been a blur — play a concert, go to sleep on the tour bus and wake up in a new city to play another concert.

“I know I’ll be spoiled for any future tours I might do because the first night we played Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver and it was sold out. And the tour bus has Wi-Fi and wide-screen TV and video!”

That was 19 years, and — seemingly — a lifetime ago for Suen.

“That photo reminds me that being in San Diego put me in contact with the kinds of people who let me know that any of this (music as a career) was even remotely possible,” he said in his recent interview from Japan.

“O was one of the first who told me: ‘You can play. You can do this.’ As you wrote about back then, he was the one who put me in touch with Louis XIV. Everything I did in San Diego is what trained me as a musician.”

Suen’s tour with Louis XIV and The Killers quickly opened another door for him. His multi-instrumental prowess earned the attention of the headlining band and he was subsequently invited to try out for them.

“I drove Ray to his Killers’ audition,” Mendenhall recalled. “We were in my black Volvo station wagon and went deep into talking about chord voicings in preparation for his audition. Looking back, there was a feeling that his life might be on the verge of something big.”

‘Ray is supremely talented’

Suen spent several years as a touring member of The Killers. His role in the band called on him to play guitar. keyboards and violin, and to provide backing vocals. He nailed all of them.

“San Diego (was) lucky to have Ray,” said Ronnie Vannucci Jr., the drummer in The Killers. “He’s one of the most talented people I’ve met. He’s got good instincts, good taste and the musical sensitivity to know where to play, where to lay out, and to be conscious of each musical situation.”

Those sentiments are shared by veteran San Diego concert promoter Tim Mays. He is the co-owner of the Casbah, a venue where Suen performed regularly with various local bands.

“Ray is supremely talented,” Mays said. “When Mariachi El Bronx first started out, it was cool to see him playing violin with them and getting to play bigger venues. I am really stoked to see he is now performing with David Byrne and then to find out he’s the musical director for David. What a trajectory! And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person.”

Suen is unsure how Byrne learned about him. But he noted that Byrne has collaborated with Lorde, for whom Suen was the music director on tours in 2017 and 2018, and again from 2021 to 2023.

The mere notion of playing with Byrne, whom he has long held in the highest regard, seemed like an unattainable fantasy when Suen saw him perform in San Diego in 2012. Byrne was then on a tour with St. Vincent. Suen was mesmerized by what the two did together, especially the often-startling new concert arrangements of the songs Byrne and St. Vincent had recorded on their joint album, “Love This Giant.”

“I remember turning to my friends, who I was seeing the show at Humphreys with,” Suen recalled. “And I said: ‘God, I hope I get to do something like this one day.’ To have the opportunity to work with David 17 years later is unbelievable. There’s no way, back then, I would have thought I’d still get to be playing music now and would have been able to work with all the people I’ve worked with.”

Suen happily sings the praises of each of the artists he has collaborated with and singled out, by name, virtually evert member of Byrne’s current band. But his admiration for Byrne, as an envelope-pushing musician and as a perpetually open-minded person eager for new aural adventure, is especially palpable.

Suen attended several concerts on Byrne’s game-changing “American Utopia” tour in 2017 and 2018. That tour set a heady new standard, sonically, conceptually and visually, for what a rock show could be.

“My mind was blown apart,” Suen said. “I remember calling Ella (Lorde) and saying: ‘You have to see this!’ She did, and she was blown away, too. We were really inspired and Lorde called David’s choreographer, Annie-B Parson. who then worked on Lorde’s ‘Solar Power’ tour.”

What does Suen most admire about Byrne? There are multiple answers.

“David is so endlessly curious and creative. He’s probably gone to two museums each day before we play a show and seen parts of each city he hasn’t seen before. Even though some of the songs we are doing are 50 years old, he’s still open to the idea of: ‘How can we do it differently?’ I came into this thinking I would get a master’s degree, and I have.”

Shifting gears

There’s more.

“David has such an idiosyncratic way of playing guitar and one of the great right hands in rock history,” Suen continued. “My understanding of Afrobeat music, like many other people’s, was filtered through David’s work with Talking Heads. He’s always open to new ideas and new ways of doing things.

“A music director does something different for each artist and tour, depending on what the gig requires. For this tour with David, it was about coming up with some different arrangements and different ideas for how to perform some of these songs, whether it’s ‘Psycho Killer’ or some of the other older tunes. But he also worked with this amazing ensemble, the Ghost Train Orchestra, to make his new record, ‘Who Is The Sky?’

“Trying to translate some of those arrangements, which were so meticulous, into the great ensemble that David has for this tour — and making them playable for this band, without using any (pre-recorded) backing tracks — has been a wonderful challenge. Those were my big responsibilities, and also making new vocal arrangements for songs that didn’t necessarily have that big of a hook.”

When Suen was approached by Byrne last year, he envisioned a far smaller role than Byrne had in mind for him.

“David started asking me questions like: ‘Do you know how to do vocal arrangements? Do you who would you recommend as a keyboard player?’ And I was like: ‘Wait a minute! What are we talking about here? I thought you were looking for a guitar player.’ And he wrote back and said: ‘No, no, no. I’m looking for a musical director.’”

Suen has handily risen to the occasion, nearly 15 years after he had his mind blown at Byrne’s San Diego performance with St. Vincent at Humphreys. And in contrast with how tongue-tied he often was during his first tours with The Killers, Suen has grown more comfortable, on stage and off.

Or as he put it in a 2009 Union-Tribune interview: “It’s comforting to know I’m so useless in front of famous people.”

Suen laughed when reminded of that quote.

“That has improved,” he said. “David has all these amazing people in his orbit. There was one night on this tour, in London, where Noel Gallagher was meant to be at the show. And I’ve met Noel before and he’s been really nice. But after the London show, expecting to see Noel, my jaw dropped a little bit when I saw Bjork was standing there talking to David.

“I’m glad that I’ve grown enough that I had the courage to introduce myself to Bjork. We had a lovely conversation and I was able to tell her how much her music meant to me. I also spoke with Kristin Scott Thomas, whose work I admire a lot. And Brian Eno was there.”

Suen pinched himself, figuratively, if not literally.

“I can’t believe how talented the musicians, singers and dancers that David has in this band are,” he said. “It’s such an amazing group of people and working with them and David really is a dream come true for me. It will take me some time to process it.”

David Byrne

When: 8 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 27

Where: Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre at SDSU, 5500 Campanile Drive

Tickets: Sold out

Online: ticketmaster.com

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