![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/6a5c6811546dfcc431141804cf5ec8f83c-davidbyrne.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
On That Note<\/a><\/p>\n \n Welcome to \u201cOn That Note,\u201d a rock-and-roll-centered column that will dive into the big stories, hot trends, and plain-old crazy ideas coming out of the music industry.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis show is more ambitious than anything I\u2019ve ever done.\u201d Witnessing David Byrne\u2019s<\/a> Who Is the Sky? tour is like stepping into a kaleidoscopic bubble bath for two hours. Turn the faucet hot, and you get the urgent reminder that \u201cLife During Wartime\u201d never really ends. Turn it again, and you can cool down with the sensual beauty known as \u201cAnd She Was.\u201d Byrne, sharing the stage with over a dozen untethered musicians \u2014 an artistic choice that he previously utilized to great effect for his American Utopia shows<\/a> \u2014 alternates between performing his solo work and Talking Heads songs to create a euphoric atmosphere, something that seems more essential than ever in 2025. Large screens, too, festoon the outer edges of the stage, adding another layer of visual communication to enhance each song\u2019s underlying message.<\/p>\n At least, that\u2019s how I would describe what my concert experience was like. Byrne doesn\u2019t want to give too much of his own thought process away. \u201cFriends attempt to describe it to me,\u201d he tells me with a chuckle, \u201cbut I wouldn\u2019t be so presumptuous as to describe it myself.\u201d<\/p>\n Byrne is currently in the final stretch of the American dates for his Who Is the Sky? tour, which was the relentlessly positive 12-song album he released back in September<\/a>. In the new year, Byrne will be expanding the tour internationally. \u201cThis show is more ambitious than anything I\u2019ve ever done,\u201d he explains. \u201cWith Stop Making Sense and American Utopia, these were ambitious ways of rethinking what a music show could be. This also is, but in its own way. I honestly don\u2019t know where I go from here.\u201d Whether that means some sort of Broadway engagement or a concert filmed for posterity, both of which were done in tandem with American Utopia, has yet to be decided. A decision that was easier for Byrne to make, though, was excavating \u201cPsycho Killer\u201d and putting the hit back into his setlist for the first time in nearly 20 years. He faced up to all of the facts in our recent chat.<\/p>\n Between the Who Is the Sky? and American Utopia tours, you\u2019ve consistently challenged yourself to see what form a concert can take. How would you describe what you\u2019re doing onstage every night? Your setlist rarely changes between nights because of the perfectly timed visual effects. How did you approach calibrating what made the final cut, given how extensive your solo and Talking Heads work is? What was your trial-and-error period like during rehearsals? Were there ideas that just couldn\u2019t be realized on a stage each night? I liked when you added footage<\/a> of ICE agents tripping and falling to your Chicago show for \u201cLife During Wartime.\u201d An overuse of screens, especially on Broadway<\/a>, often hits an uncanny valley and takes viewers out of a show. How did you arrive at the artistic decision to use screens and utilize them in a way that ensured it would enhance your performance? We realized in the early days of rehearsals that if there was too much going on with the screens, the solution was to take it out. It\u2019s really distracting. The eye goes to whatever is happening on a screen like that. So you just have to be very careful not to overpower the real people on stage. It\u2019s a very tricky balance. You go, No, no, no. That\u2019s taking away from what\u2019s going on with me! If I go into a restaurant that has big sports screens, even if I\u2019m not even interested, my eyes go straight to the screen.<\/p>\n Prior to the first show of this tour, you hadn\u2019t performed \u201cPsycho Killer\u201d live in nearly 20 years. What made you resistant to play that song during this time period and why did it feel right to revisit it now? So this time I worked with our music director and said, \u201cThere\u2019s a version<\/a> that Arthur Russell arranged years ago. It\u2019s a very different-sounding version of the song. It\u2019s the same song, it has everything, but it has a different feeling and it\u2019s maybe a little more interior feeling than the rock-out version.\u201d So I figured, let\u2019s do that one. We have a cello player, so we can get someone doing the cello parts every night. I thought that would be fun to present. Everybody recognizes it as soon as the bass line starts. But then it\u2019s a slightly different version than the one you might be used to.<\/p>\n Do you have any other songs, to your point, that you\u2019ve grown tired of playing?
\n Photo: Scott Legato\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
In the way that American Utopia evolved from a concert into a Broadway thing with a little more shape to it, this picks up from there and goes further. There\u2019s more talking and it\u2019s more theatrical as far as the scale. It\u2019s a lot more exuberant, a lot more colorful. It\u2019s a hybrid between a theater engagement and a concert. I don\u2019t know if that helps people at all because there are other shows that mix like that. I saw Lady Gaga\u2019s show and it took me to another place entirely. But for me, there\u2019s a theme and there\u2019s a story. Now don\u2019t ask me to articulate it \u2014 that\u2019s your job. But there is a theme and a feeling that runs through the whole thing. Some of that is intentional, but some of it is just what happens.<\/p>\n
Yeah, the only songs we change depending on the night are \u201cI Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party\u201d and \u201cMoisturizing Thing,\u201d which are both from the new album and \u201cstory songs.\u201d But they\u2019re both amusing, so we swap those out with each other. Other than that, it\u2019s consistent. We\u2019re thinking of having more swap-outs, but the whole thing is very designed and even the transitions from one song to another are perfectly worked out. It\u2019s an involved thing to make changes. That\u2019s a very theatrical thing, isn\u2019t it? Doing that is very common in theater. It\u2019s not as common in concerts where people will say, \u201cOh, hey, let\u2019s do this tonight, or let\u2019s do that.\u201d The hope is that in making the effort to work that stuff out, it brings something else to the table.<\/p>\n
There were songs we tried to learn that just didn\u2019t sound great or didn\u2019t have the same feeling that matched the other selections. There was choreography that we did where I blamed myself because I could never quite get it. So we\u2019d reworked those types of things. We use a big LED wall during the show. In the first three weeks or so of the tour, we kept refining the walls. There\u2019s a song called \u201cLike Humans Do\u201d \u2014 we added an element of a projection of ourselves in animal masks dancing and doing the exact same thing as what we\u2019re doing on the floor.<\/p>\n
Yes. [Laughs for several seconds.] In Chicago they\u2019re totally related to that.<\/p>\n
Often in concerts when we see screens, usually it\u2019s closeups of the singer or band members or dancers. I said, \u201cNo, we should never do that. No exceptions.\u201d Because then my experience when the performers are on the big screen, all you do is just watch the screen. You paid a lot of money to watch television. So I thought, We can use it another way. We can use it to put ourselves in various places. We can put ourselves on the moon. We can put ourselves in a bar or in my apartment or at a party on a New York rooftop. Not a lot has to happen. You\u2019re immersed in us.<\/p>\n
Wow, you\u2019re right. Let me think about this. Certainly for the last American Utopia tour, that tour was about providing an alternative \u2014 as is this one, too, with what I see happening around the country and around the world. As much as people like that song, I thought \u201cPsycho Killer\u201d didn\u2019t really fit into that theme. Before that, it was probably just me being willful and going, I\u2019m tired of doing this song.<\/p>\n
\u201cPsycho Killer\u201d is kind of an exception because it was the first song I wrote. It was written from my point of view as a way to see, Can I write a song? And I discovered, Oh, I can. Then I kind of changed lanes and decided I\u2019m going to write songs that are more along the lines of what I\u2019m about rather than trying to see if I can write a song. There are popular songs that I\u2019ve never done in a big concert setting that would go over well. \u201cWild Wild Life\u201d from True Stories is probably the biggest one. My grandson loves that one. But the song was written to be almost a parody of MTV for a specific scene in that movie. So I\u2019m kind of stuck thinking of it that way. At some point I might feel like, Oh, who cares? I\u2019ll perform it now. Most of the audience probably never saw the movie, so they don\u2019t see it that way. But I do.<\/p>\n