And you may ask yourself: “Well, why don’t the Talking Heads reunite?’”
The answer, as always, is in the music. As David Byrne shows on Who Is The Sky?, his first solo album in seven years, he’d rather challenge himself musically than take the easy route – and the big paycheck – of reforming his old band to play the hits in huge arenas.
Titled after a voice-to-text message (“who is this guy?”) gone awry, Who Is The Sky? finds the 73-year-old singer mixing chamber music with Latin, rock and funk rhythms. The lyrics are whimsical and unmistakably Byrnesian: One minute, he’s talking with Buddha about junk food; the next he’s taking an anti-aging lotion that transforms him into a toddler.
Since leaving the Heads in 1991, he’s been on the constant prowl for new adventures. He’s scored music for theater, film and TV, written nonfiction books about music and bicycling and composed a “disco opera” about the life of Imelda Marcos. This fall, Byrne launched a career-spanning concert tour, backed by 12 musicians and dancers.
I spoke with him by video call from a tour stop in Detroit, where he’d arrived “at some ungodly hour in the middle of the night.” After taking a moment to straighten his shock of silver hair, Byrne was ready to chat.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Who Is The Sky? is such a sunny, thought-provoking album. How do you think it differs from your past albums?
Wow. I don't know. There's a lot of narrative story songs that wrap up with little conclusions, or “What does it mean?” That’s unusual for me. And there's a number of love songs. I don't do that very often because I feel like it's well-trodden territory. I recently got married, so that might have something to do with it. (In September, he tied the knot with businesswoman/author Mala Gaonkar.)
Then there's the music, the collaboration with the Ghost Train Orchestra with (British producer) Kid Harpoon at my side. That was very different than what I've done before. I was kind of throwing myself in the deep end and hoping it all worked.
I'm lucky and privileged that I've done well enough to be able to afford to make these records on my own terms and then deliver it to a record company and just say, “Well, here it is. We hope you like it.” Which they did. Or so they say.
In “Everybody Laughs,” you sing about finding inspiration in mundane things like “the ceiling of the subway station.” That’s one of your strengths as a songwriter: You shine a light on things people might not notice.
Well, thank you. I've always felt that, to a large extent, the ordinary is where we live. We're attracted to stories that deal with the extraordinary. But a great percentage of our lives is filled with pretty banal stuff, and I thought, “But that's where we make the thousands of small decisions about what matters to us.” I mean, the big things make for big dramatic movies, but I thought, “Let's see if I can explore how we actually lead our daily lives.”
That song features Dallas musician Annie Clark (St. Vincent), who you’d previously collaborated with on 2012’s Love This Giant album. What originally drew you to her music?
To my ears, we have a kind of similarity. We're working in the pop world, in a way, but also kind of pushing the boundaries and trying different things and going our own way. After we did a record together, we've stayed in touch and stayed close. She came and sang at my wedding.
“What Is the Reason for It?” is a heavy song about the meaning of love, and it ends on an optimistic note. What have you learned about love over the years?
Wow. Well, as I say in the song, and one of the things I've learned, is that we don't know much about it. There's all sorts of theories and research about what it's for, what uses it serves in our lives, evolutionary purposes, all those kind of things. And I thought, “But when you're in it, it doesn't feel like that.” You may be fulfilling some evolutionary mission. But when you’re in it, you’re kind of sucked into another way of seeing the world.
It's been almost 40 years since the release of True Stories, a movie you directed and filmed largely in Dallas. Did you set out to ask specific questions about Texas?
Well, yes, but I was hoping it could be seen as applying to other places as well. I sense that, as in the movie, there are people in Texas who are fairly eccentric and they're proud of their eccentricities. The bigness of the state allows people to live and express themselves in all these different ways, and they don't have to apologize for it. It's kind of “OK. This is who I am, this is what I do and I'm fine with it.” That's true in how people live, but also in all the different kinds of music that there are in the state.
I obviously cherry-picked the things I wanted to see. Although I shot around Dallas, I wanted it to look a little bit more like West Texas, a bit more flat and barren, so I kind of cherry-picked my locations that way. But yeah, I had a great time doing it. It came back out on Criterion a few years ago, and God bless 'em, they really did a beautiful job with the bonus features and a documentary where they talked to all these different people who worked on the movie.
Your American Utopia tour was one of the best concerts I’d seen in years. It also spawned an acclaimed Broadway show and concert film. Are there similarities between that tour and your current tour?
The similarities? Those are easy. We're continuing to have everyone untethered, so the drummers and everybody is moving around on the stage. On (American Utopia,) I thought, “I can't go back to having people rooted in place and having the drummers be this thing in the background.” So I kept that.
I kept that we have matching outfits, but now they're bright blue. We're supposed to get some orange ones, too. The tone is more vibrant. (American Utopia) was very minimal in the lighting, with gray chain (curtains), and we were all dressed in gray. This tour kind of goes the other way: It's very colorful with lots of scenes where we're on the moon or in a forest. We're doing, like, virtual locations.
What's the biggest misconception about you or your music?
Starting from quite a long time ago, there was a feeling that my music and me are kind of overly intellectual, that it doesn't have as much heart as it could have, or as much heart as some people might wish it had. I don't sing about the usual subjects, so that might be part of that.
But I think that I'm passionate about what I'm doing. Part of the decision to work with Ghost Train Orchestra and add those orchestrations and strings was to bring out what I felt was the inherent emotion in the songs that might not be apparent if it was just me and my voice and a rhythm. Because people might have those prior assumptions about me, I thought, “Oh, let me see if I can go a bit counter to that and help bring out what I hear as the feeling in the material.”
You’re the perfect person to write a song titled “The Avant Garde,” since you often have one foot in the avant garde and the other in the mainstream. Do you have a philosophy about mixing the two?
I do. The song doesn't quite explain it, but I’m really interested in things that are going on in the fringes and people who are trying all sorts of different things. Sometimes I'll see or hear something and it's hugely influential. It doesn't mean I copy it, but it kind of opens a door where I go, “There's another way of doing this,” whether it's staging a show or making music or whatever.
It's really risky. As the song says, you often get things that really don't mean much of anything, or have not been fully thought through. When the experiments don’t work, they can be really disappointing.
But when they do work, the rewards are huge. So for me, it's worth it.
DETAILS: An Evening with David Byrne at 8 p.m. Nov. 28-29 at Music Hall at Fair Park, 909 First Ave., Dallas. $49.50 and up. ticketmaster.com.
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