David Byrne has been a part of the pop-culture bedrock for nearly 50 years — so long that it’s sometimes easy to take him for granted.
After the creative burst that vaulted him into the public consciousness via his first five albums with Talking Heads — a period that includes most of his best-known songs, from “Psycho Killer” to “Once in a Lifetime” and “Burning Down the House” — he’s long since settled into a kind of creative cruising altitude: He’s still exploring and innovating, working diligently on a long array of albums, art projects, soundtracks, books and other endeavors that reflect his seemingly boundless curiosity and delight in art, humans and the world. But it’s with less intensity and confrontation, and less of a sense of hurtling toward the sun.
Still, it’s hard to think of another artist who’s collaborated as widely over the years, spanning as many genres and generations and disciplines with such focus. To cite just two analogous examples of his vast array of work, he won an Oscar in 1988 for the soundtrack to “The Last Emperor,” in collaboration with the late Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, and was nominated for a second 36 years later for the song “This Is a Life,” from “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” with indie-rock icon Mitski, who wasn’t even born when Byrne won his first.
His countless other collaborators over the last half century include everyone from Brian Eno to playwright Robert Wilson, from St. Vincent to dancer-choreographer Twyla Tharp, from the B-52s to Caetano Veloso, Phillip Glass and De La Soul; he’s covered songs by Cole Porter, Yoko Ono, Whitney Houston, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Janelle Monae and even one from Verdi’s 1853 opera “La traviata.” At the Governors Ball festival in June, he not only performed two songs with Olivia Rodrigo, they’d spent a couple of days working out choreography to go with them.
The long second phase of Byrne’s musical career began with Talking Heads’ 1985 album “Little Creatures” and has continued through the 13 pop-leaning albums he’s made since, including the new “Who Is the Sky?,” his first for the iconic indie label Matador, which is out today (Sept. 5). Unlike the later catalogs of most of his predecessors and contemporaries, a deep dive into the Byrne canon is continually rewarding. Each album is inspired — rather than perfunctory or aimless — and has a dominant musical style, yet they also have, say, a calypso or disco or alt-rock song, one sung in Spanish or French or Italian or with a string quartet or zydeco band, or an overlooked gem like 2001’s “The Moment of Conception” or his infectious 2010 collaboration with TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, “Apartment Wrestling.”
His albums and collaborations have seen him exploring widely while at the same time remaining in place — his songwriting has stayed relatively conventional and constant, bearing his distinctive melodies and lyrics peppered with pop-culture references, delivered in his unmistakable reedy voice.
But the music accompanying those songs has changed dramatically with each album — from the African rhythms of “Naked” through the Latin beats of “Rei Momo” to a dozen-year stretch that saw him moving from string-and horn-driven chamber pop (“Growing Backward”) to the reunion with his late-’70s collaborator Brian Eno (“Everything That Happens Will Happen Today”); then a musical about Imelda Marcos (“Here Lies Love”) followed by a brass-powered joint album with St. Vincent (“Love This Giant”). It all reached a sort of culmination with “American Utopia,” his 2018 album that spawned a galvanizing, career-spanning tour that morphed into a Broadway show and then a Spike Lee-directed concert film.
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“Who Is the Sky?” — its title is taken from a mis-transcribed voicenote — continues and expands on that history and finds Byrne’s creativity in full bloom. The album includes plenty of his characteristic lyrics and oddball stories — one about a man whose use of skin moisturizer makes him age backward, another a comic poke at the avant-garde, another with the definitively Byrne title “My Apartment Is My Friend.”
His collaborators are as far-reaching and unexpected as ever: Harry Styles/ Miley Cyrus producer Kid Harpoon; the esoteric dozen-member Ghost Train Orchestra; even Paramore singer Hayley Williams. Several of the album’s songs are among the first ones he wrote after a rare writer’s block induced by the pandemic.
That songwriting hiatus “wasn’t on purpose — I tried to write,” Byrne says, sitting at his desk in his loft-sized downtown Manhattan office. “The pandemic made people question everything, sometimes in a good way: ‘Does what I do matter? Who even cares about a song at this point?’ But as we started to come out of it, I realized, ‘Oh, music does help people’ — it’s not that I’m 100% altruistic, it’s as much therapy for myself as it is for the listener. And then it started coming back of its own accord, little by little.”
Byrne’s songwriting process is its own tale. During a listening session for the new album earlier in the summer, he was asked about the inspiration for his songs. “It can come from a lot of places,” he replied. “Like, I was riding my bike up here today, and I saw a man and thought, ‘He’s got cowboy titties!’ And then I thought, ‘Maybe there’s something there.’”
Reminded of the exchange, Byrne says after laughing uproariously, “Well, obviously that one’s not going to be a song. But yes, sometimes there’s a little phrase or image, and I jot down an idea for a song title or maybe the first two or three lines, like ‘I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party,’” he says, citing another “Who Is the Sky?” song. “There’s a story in that — ‘OK, what happens next?’”
One of the more bizarre is “Moisturizer.” “My fiancee [businesswoman and artist Mala Gaonkar, whom he’s scheduled to marry this weekend] often reminds me, ‘David, don’t forget the moisturizer.’ And one time I just thought, what if it really works? Then you have this fantasy of waking up and looking a lot younger, and that comes with its own problems.
“That’s the nice thing about music,” he continues. “It’s in some ways multidimensional: The music can be telling you one thing, and the lyrics don’t have to be saying that exact thing. Something happens when they’re put together and you have this tension or conceptual dissonance — you get this third thing that’s kind of exciting.”
The first songs he ever wrote, however, were not so exciting. “I remember writing one called ‘Bald-Headed Woman’ when I was a teenager,” he recalls. “It was terrible, really derivative, and I said, ‘No, you’re not ready to do this yet.’ So maybe seven years later, I tried again, and that was ‘Psycho Killer.’”
He pauses before saying, with no small understatement, “People liked that one.”
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Byrne’s office almost seems like a reflection of his mind. The main room is dominated by towering floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded with meticulously organized books, magazines, vinyl, CDs, DVDs, trophies — including a Grammy and his Oscar — and a collection of esoteric tchotchkes and objects. Sitting on a windowsill are anatomical models of human brains, a human ear, an earthworm and a clam. “There’s a lot going on in the earthworm!” he enthuses. “And what’s going on inside a clam?”
Asked whether Variety is getting an unexpected reveal of themes for his forthcoming tour, Byrne says with a laugh, “No, nothing about worms and clams. But these anatomical models, they’re kind of beautiful.” He picks up the ear. “Look how abstract it looks. I just like these as kind of art objects.”
A hallmark of Byrne’s creative work is finding art where others often don’t — he’s staged full-scale projects based around things as seemingly mundane as PowerPoint and color guards — but also with a simplicity that seems obvious but isn’t. For example, Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense” tour of 1983-84, where each of the nine band members took the stage one song at a time, or “American Utopia,” where even the drummers were mobile.
“That’s what I thought!,” he says of the seeming obviousness of the tour concepts. “Before ‘American Utopia,’ I was like, ‘Am I gonna be a couple of weeks into the tour and then somebody says, “David just copied Phil Collins” or whoever?’”
Of course, both the “Stop Making Sense” and “American Utopia” tours were wildly successful, and his musicians will again be mobile for the “Who Is the Sky?” concerts.
“I thought, ‘I can’t go back to the players and singers being static,’” he says. “It came out of working with St. Vincent, where there were a lot of brass players, who are used to being mobile because a lot of them came out of marching bands. But what I didn’t realize was the other effects that it would have: It kind of democratized the band and the performers. The drummers could now come to the front of the stage and the audience would cheer, and I realized, ‘Wow, everybody gets to be a star at some point in the show.’”
The forthcoming tour will have many new elements as well. “There’s going to be more dancers and lots more movement this time,” he says. “And there’s going to be a kind of curved LED screen, so that for one song we’re somewhere in a forest and for another we’re on a New York street or an apartment, and so on. I did some tests a couple of months ago at a soundstage, and it’s one of those things where [the illusion] doesn’t quite fool you, but you buy into it by seeing how the trick is done.”
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Even as he relentlessly drives forward, Byrne is often pulled back into the past. The last year has seen a pair of archival projects related to the approaching 50th anniversary of Talking Heads’ first two albums, complete with a new video for “Psycho Killer” starring Saoirse Ronan and directed by Mike Mills (“Thumbsucker,” “20th Century Woman”). The video was teased with countdown clocks that inevitably were seized upon by fans as foreshadowing a Talking Heads reunion, which Byrne has said many times isn’t going to happen.
“I’m not a nostalgic person and I don’t want to live in the past,” he says. “So [when the rumors started], it was like, ‘Oh no, here we go again.’ But so far, it’s been pretty good. I know Mike Mills, and he had a wonderful idea for the video that was a very different take and didn’t involve some psycho killing people,” he laughs. “So it’s kind of making something new out of something old.”
Although he’s reached a very positive place with his former bandmates, he cautions, “There are always people who will long for [a reunion], but be careful what you long for. You can’t rewind the clock and be 20 years old again. The music you hear, the shows you see at that point in your life can have a huge impact, but you can’t recreate that. You might enjoy hearing those songs again, but it’s not going to be the same.”
But maybe the most telling difference between then and now is Byrne himself. His early-career persona was awkward, angular and at times confrontational (he’s described himself as a “little tyrant” during his years with Talking Heads), but suddenly, around the time of the band’s mainstream breakthrough in the mid-1980s, he seemed much more at ease with fame and attention, and more open to collaboration.
“I think in the in the past I’d be more ‘My way or the highway: I have a vision and this is the way it has to be,’” he says. “But now, I think I can catch more flies with honey.”
Indeed, says “Who Is the Sky?” producer Kid Harpoon, “David allows you to really explore your own creativity within what he’s trying to achieve. The freedom you feel working with him is really inspiring.”
To a degree rare for someone at his level of fame, Byrne has been a ubiquitous and exceedingly normal presence in New York for decades, frequently spotted at concerts and art openings, often by himself, or riding his bike all over the city. Most stars roll with at least one security staffer if not an entourage; longtime SoHo resident David Bowie flew under the radar in dorky outfits one would never dream he’d be seen in. Especially in the selfie age, how does Byrne still move about so freely?
“If I go to a show and there’s a bunch of music fans there, then there’s a good chance they’re going to recognize me and maybe ask for a picture or something like that,” he says. “But if I’m getting my groceries, pretty much no. New York is good in that way — they leave people alone, for the most part.
“I also think that [celebrity brouhaha] is sometimes self-inflicted,” he continues. “If someone shows up with bodyguards in a big limo and make a big entrance, or if they come across as being slightly unapproachable and mysterious, then people are going to clamor. But if you just seem like an ordinary person, where’s the excitement?”
So was that earlier David Byrne, with his gawky vocal tics and demeanor, a persona, or was it him?
“If it was a persona, I’m not totally aware of that, although I might be…” He thinks for a moment before continuing. “It was really how I was feeling at the time: I felt very awkward, as somebody who wasn’t always socially comfortable, to be thrown into this situation where you have to socialize and be nice to a whole bunch of people you don’t even know.
“But,” he continues, smiling, “I’m going to guess there might have been a little part of me that thought, ‘I can make a thing out of this — I don’t have to hide it.’”
After hundreds of collaborations and thousands of public appearances and interviews, he certainly seems to have gotten past whatever it was.
“I credit performing, working with other musicians,” he concludes. “It’s like when people say, ‘A DJ saved my life’: Music is very therapeutic, and I think eventually, little by little, it got me out of that.”