What is Going On Here?
David Byrne, bygones, and there here and now
For a long time, David Byrne was an actor playing an imponderable version of himself. He wore “shoes with no socks in cold weather”, in one of the great Talking Heads songs from the cryptic, delphic years. “I’m visiting houses in motion.”
It was persistent. It was hard to know where to look or what to think with all the strange Lynchian dilemmas, the disguises and the metaphysical, deadpan dead ends.
In 1983, to promote Talking Heads’ concert movie Stop Making Sense, Byrne and the late director Jonathan Demme made a short film of Byrne interviewing himself, playing with body image, identity and the entertainment business. It was the very early days of music video. Max Headroom was not yet on TV and Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House”, where it all changed for the band in terms of sales, was made but not yet released.
Byrne is in the iconic big suit, making his head tiny, which he intended. The suit’s design was inspired by Japanese kabuki and Noh theatre, with their exaggerated sense of “self”, and by the squared-off royalty in a deck of playing cards.
He masquerades as a series of interviewers in the promo: a lugubrious woman with expansive hand gestures; a black man in a suit, tie and glasses (Byrne apologised in 2020 for the blackface); and an agitated music-industry dude in a Hawaiian shirt, yellow suit and shoes with no socks. In part, it goes:
Why did you call the movie Stop Making Sense?
Because it’s good advice. Because music and performing does not make sense.
We see a variety of hairstyles in rock groups these days, huh?
One must never underestimate the power of a good hairdo. I’d like to write a song about hairdos, not about the people under ‘em.
And then:
What do the words of your songs mean to you? I mean, you don’t write love songs, do ya?
Uh, I try to write about small things… paper, animals, a house. Love is kinda big. I have written a love song, though. In this film, I sing it to a lamp.
Some of this is even true. He has written songs about paper, animals and homes. Talking Heads’ second album, released in 1978, was called More Songs About Buildings and Food. And he has definitely written love songs. Yet mostly, back then, David Byrne was about irony and deflection.
Fast forward to now, more than 40 years later. Byrne is 73, with a shock of silver hair, and he has now largely abandoned such disguises in favour of another set: chronic positivity, acute sincerity and what comes across in his regular media appearances as a deep concern for all people. I say chronic positivity rather than toxic positivity because he does also acknowledge the bad in the world — and there’s so much to choose from lately — but not very often.
This is exactly how his blockbuster Broadway show and subsequent 2020 concert film American Utopia, directed by Spike Lee, hits: as a joyous and affirming synchronised dance piece that acknowledges Black Lives Matter at the end. His new Who Is the Sky? tour hits similar notes.
Two years ago, in an article for Rotary magazine — yes, international charity organisation Rotary — Byrne wondered about true happiness and expressed concern, while citing historian Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, about whether we are actually imprisoned in our cities and segregated by malevolent technology. “Are we becoming nations of individuals, as Thatcher viewed us,” he asked, “rather than a society?”
This was a thread that perhaps began back in 1979, with “Cities” on the great Talking Heads album Fear of Music, where he tries in vain to glorify the idea of a metropolis, where the smell is from the river, where there’s a “lot of ghosts in a lot of houses”. With a voice trembling and febrile with unease, he feigns a sense of belonging, positioning the city as a “good place to get some thinking done / … / I got it figured out”.
Get Chris Johnston’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The most enduring Talking Heads’ song, after the “Cities” era but before the songwriting hurtled toward pop in the 1980s, is the still-astounding existential disco banger “Once In a Lifetime”, from 1981, in which the antihero is a man alone, lost, let down, stranded in a life apart from any idea of togetherness: “And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’”
Such affectation — the hiding behind irony and intellect — has been dispensed with in his later years. Where he once seemed atomised from the human race — even if demonstrating concern about that — he now explicitly embraces the collective. He says as much in in a 2025 podcast for the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkley. It’s a remarkably different tone.
“We’re not just individuals,” he says. “Our identity, who we are as entities and people, is intimately tied up with other people. We don’t exist just as atomised beings. We exist in a social situation and that’s how we evaluate ourselves.”
He also talks about his online project Reasons to Be Cheerful, which only publishes (fact-checked) good news. When I looks at it, the lead story is about French prisoners soon to get out of jail, who, through a non-profit organisation, are working outdoors on a local farm to get used to fresh air again.
And while he concedes that “forces” could tear the United States apart and that news can be false these days, he impresses upon the podcast’s host, a psychologist, that there is joy everywhere. Not only that, but finding it is, he believes, instinctual. He seems almost to be saying that finding it where we might not have found it before is a survival skill if we are to get through the bad times. Bad news is now the literal, algorithmic default. “We’re barraged by it. It’s very hard to combat that and not just internalise it and feel like the world is a very dark place.”
It’s as though Byrne now wants to hold tiny shreds of humanity tightly rather than questioning every shred he comes across. Does this just mean he has grown older and started making sense? I think, like many of us, he is now about controlling only what he can control, in his neighbourhood, his community, his building.
Byrne began talking some time ago about probably having a form of undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. He raises it again on the science podcast in terms of always being shy and awkward, but now, to decrease atomisation, he’s become that guy who talks to randoms. “A woman at the checkout counter in the grocery store,” he says, for example. “We’ll share a laugh. Or someone that I’ll cross paths with, a complete stranger.”
Talking Heads acrimoniously split in 1991. I’ve always felt that the personal and public David Byrne might be very different. The other three core members (bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz, and keyboardist and guitarist Jerry Harrison) had been unhappy with Byrne for some time.
As the film and album Stop Making Sense were being reissued two years ago, Weymouth and her husband, Frantz, who met Byrne in 1973, spoke to The Sunday Times in the United Kingdom and it wasn’t pretty. Frantz said Byrne manipulated song credits to get himself more money and Weymouth referred to having called him “Trumpian” with “disastrous character flaws”. She said she made the comments because “everything with David is transactional — he will use you until he has no more use for you. He always seemed very insecure about himself and would often try to blame other people if things went wrong.” Weymouth also suggested Byrne’s newfound community-minded talking points might be laboured, because he couldn’t call her or Frantz by name, which, she said, was not a hallmark of contentedness.
Maybe the quirks in his brain mean he’s better talking to strangers in Wholefoods than those close to him — I don’t know. Maybe he’s more at home on stage than in closer communication — I don’t know. Regardless, he’s prolific. Since Talking Heads, Byrne has released 10 solo albums and around as many soundtracks for film and stage (some very fine, some average), including feted collaborations with St. Vincent and his old mate Brian Eno. He has the good news publication. And in 2008, he designed bicycle stands for Brooklyn and Manhattan, among many other polymathematic achievements. He is possibly the only celebrity to arrive at the Met Gala on a bike.
This year, he married for the second time, to author and hedge-fund manager Mala Gaonkar, and put the wedding playlist (Eno, Mulatu Astatke, Moondog, Acker Bilk and lots of Latin jazz) on Spotify.
And he also released the album Who Is the Sky?, with Ghost Train Orchestra as the band and Kid Harpoon (Harry Styles, Florence + the Machine) as producer. The ensemble is a young, New York 12-piece that normally resurrect very old jazz in new styles, but Who Is the Sky? is very basic, lyrical pop based on drum loops and acoustic guitar. This is not without precedent for Byrne. Stop Making Sense begins with him accompanied by a boom box holding the beat from “Psycho Killer”, the first song Talking Heads ever wrote, as he proceeds to strum guitar and sing.
I feel like I’ve been listening to David Byrne sing forever. I saw the last live show Talking Heads ever played, in 1984 (in Christchurch, bringing the Stop Making Sense tour to a close). The first five albums are my desert island discs — any one of them if I had to narrow it down.
When I first owned 1980’s masterpiece Remain in Light as a 17-year-old, after it was released because I was going backwards from Stop Making Sense, everything shifted, and it’s now clear why, since then, I’ve loved to dance. “The Great Curve”, which closes side one, is an invitation to dance, but also explains through female-centred metaphors the joy of it: it means we can move with a rhythm we don’t fully understand and don’t need to, as “She is moving to describe the world / … / World moves and it bounces and hops”. Dance music was familiar to me from this point on: African rhythms, funk and Eno sound design. It was all there for me on this one great thing.
Disappointingly, after all this time, Who Is the Sky? is unsatisfying. For the most part, it’s unfunky — the rhythms are static and unadventurous. There is no invitation to dance, or even to move. And lyrically, it skips across the surface of things and seems sentimental for the sake of it, without any real sentiment. The problem is that something new such as “I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party” sounds like a parody Byrne title, and, somewhat inevitably, a parody Byrne song too, with its drum/boombox intro, the familiar acoustic guitar, a story of an interaction, and nothing more. “Moisturizing Thing” has him trying an anti-ageing product and turning into a baby. “A Door Called No” is Talking Heads’ “Heaven” (“A place where nothing / nothing ever happens”), from Fear of Music, replayed. It’s almost an exact copy, which the songwriter has every right to do, but still.
And then there’s “My Apartment Is My Friend”. Just from the title you can probably guess how it goes. It’s not very good, but at the same time it’s central to Byrne’s evolution from sardonic, distanced observation to grand, ambitious humanism. Once, a building he might offer to us — an apartment — would be a place about which he could only be anxious or wry. In “Don’t Worry About the Government”, from the very first album, Talking Heads: 77 — offered amid punk — the building is a trap. It “has every convenience / It’s gonna make life easy for me”. The building means “It’s gonna be easy to get things done”. He can relax, “along with my loved ones”. We understand none of this can be taken at face value. The tone is menacing. Now, he anthropomorphises home, and in shallow terms. The apartment has “seen me at my worst” and “stood by me when darkness fell”, and so forth. The apartment is my friend. It knows me, it is sentient.
I admire Byrne’s change of his heart. There’s nothing wrong with finding the joy — in fact, there’s a lot to be said for it, usually. And change is good. I admire his live performances these days, too. There’s no doubt he has a knack for lifting peoples’ spirits in a concert hall. I admire the good he tries to do societally and culturally. But I think too much time has passed for both of us now. It seems his shift to a gleeful sincerity doesn’t move me, or I’m too stubborn to change with him. How ironic that I should find myself feeling alienated from David Byrne, once my voice of alienation.
Originally published at https://www.themonthly.com.au.
