David Byrne: ‘Am I Ever Going to Get Any of This Figured Out?’

D
avid Byrne strolls into his downtown Manhattan office around noon and promptly removes all of his footwear. He’s been in this prewar building only for a few months, but it’s already unmistakably his own, looking as much like a work space as it does like a museum of the unusual items he’s collected throughout his decades as one of pop’s most curious minds. Meticulously organized metal shelving lines one long wall full of music books, art books, history books, and enough DVDs to put the Criterion Closet to shame. An Oscar, a Grammy, and an MTV Video Music Award are positioned unobtrusively among kitschy treasures like an ancient can of macadamia nuts with Spam and a cassette of a speech by Bob Dole. “It took a while before everything was up and on the bookshelves,” he says. “But once that happened, it was like, ‘OK, we’re home again.’”

Not long after we finish talking, Byrne will head into rehearsals for a 50-date North American tour in support of his excellent new album, Who Is the Sky? (out Sept. 5 on Matador Records). At 73 years old, he’s as full of restless energy as ever, eager to talk about the creative process behind this album, which he made with Top 40 producer Kid Harpoon, or about his recent onstage collaborations with stars like Olivia Rodrigo.

He’s also well aware that much of the world would rather see him perform with Talking Heads, the peerlessly inventive rock group he led with bass player Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz, and multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison before splitting under less-than-friendly circumstances in 1991. Byrne has built an impressively flexible solo career since then, making catchy and fascinating records with a widely varied cast of collaborators and selling out hundreds of nights on Broadway with his 2019 American Utopia show. But none of those triumphs got the public more excited than the promotional appearances he made last year with Weymouth, Frantz, and Harrison for an A24 rerelease of Stop Making Sense, the 1984 concert film that is in many ways Talking Heads’ magnum opus.

Anyone who’s hoping to see Byrne reunite with Talking Heads is out of luck. At least they can look forward to seeing brilliantly reworked versions of some of their favorite songs in Byrne’s current stage show. “I can mix and match and have it adapt to the sound that I’m doing at the moment without completely destroying the integrity of the older songs,” he says. “But I’m also aware that there’s a real trap. If you do too much of the older material, you become a legacy act that comes out and plays the old hits. You cash in really quick, but then you’ve dug yourself a hole.” 

The title of your new album originated in a misheard phrase, right?
Yes. Somebody was sending me a text using voice-to-text, and the algorithm got it a little bit wrong. And what came up on my phone was “Who is the sky?” And I thought, “That’s a beautiful phrase.” I know what they were really saying — it’s pretty easy to tell, in English anyway. But I thought, “I’m going to put that on the list of album titles.” And I realized that it fit in other ways. There’s a lot of songs where I’m asking, “Who am I? Who is this? What is that about? Why do we do this?” I also had this thought that the image on the record cover would be me partly hidden. So: “Who is this guy?”

That’s an interesting question to ask about yourself this far into your career. It’s not a debut album.
You’d think at my age I would know who I am. But no, we’re always still figuring it out. Figuring out who we are and where we belong and how we feel about things. We’ll never really know all the answers.

You have a great song on this album called “My Apartment Is My Friend.” Were you thinking of a particular apartment? 
I was thinking of my apartment, where I live now. During Covid, I tried to write songs and wasn’t really able to write much. I wrote words for a song called “Six Feet Apart” or “Six Feet Away,” about seeing someone, but you can’t get any closer than six feet because of social distancing, and you couldn’t see this person’s face because of the mask, that kind of thing. I sent the words to John Mulaney and said, “What do you think?” There was a line about “She had Purell in her purse” — he liked that. But I never used it. I thought, “What’s happening, it’s serious. This is not a joke. There’s ambulances parked outside my building, the sirens are going day and night.” But after it all passed, I came up with these words for “My Apartment Is My Friend.”

The pandemic was a harrowing time here in New York, but you got a song that feels positive and uplifting out of that. 
Yeah. This is how I felt. My apartment is cradling me. I know I’m the only one there. No one else is visiting. I’m going to watch an old movie on streaming at night and I’m going to cook something that I haven’t tried to cook before. And I don’t know how messy it looked. There’d be a big temptation to just be like, “Well, it’s my mess.”

How long have you lived in that apartment?
Not that long, relatively speaking. Maybe 15 years now. It might seem fairly long, but I’ve lived in New York for a long time. 

Do you remember what your first apartment in New York was like, when you moved here in 1974?
Well, when I first moved here, I slept on the floor of an artist’s loft. He had just gotten it, and the deal was room and board for helping him fix it up — sand the floors and paint and build a loft bed for him and all that kind of stuff. That was an entry. And then eventually I moved into a loft nearby with two of the Talking Heads. Cold-water loft, no hot water, and no toilet. It was all right. Didn’t have all the conveniences that one might like, and I wrote a song about that called “Don’t Worry About the Government.” 

New York in the 1970s is often romanticized. Do you think people get that time period right?
Yeah, people romanticize the grit and the dirt. On some level it was good, because the city was on its knees, so it was ignoring a lot of stuff. There were jazz clubs and discos in lofts in SoHo and other places. And the city just turned a blind eye to all this stuff. These places were far from legal, and musicians would live in these lofts and pay very low rent. It’s shocking how low the rent was, but that’s how funky the neighborhood was. And that allowed all of us to get a foothold. I had a part-time day job, but that was enough for me to contribute rent with the band roommates. So you could make your way. God forbid my parents would’ve visited. 

What was your dream when you were living in that cold-water loft?
When I moved here, my ambition was to be what we called a fine artist, an artist who would show in galleries and things like that. But the kind of art I was doing, phew, I wasn’t getting anywhere with it. I did these questionnaires and surveys. Some of the things were very conceptual. I think there was a single line on a big piece of paper, but it was in the exact shape of the New Jersey Turnpike. You can imagine, a little bit of an uphill climb to get that to go, but I was really enjoying doing that. The music stuff, I thought, “This is fun, but don’t get your hopes up. There are really great musicians out there, great singers. There’s people who are a lot better than you are.”

You’re at a point now where you can make a record and you know it will be rapturously received. Has it always felt like people understood what you were doing?
Oh, no. There was a period, it might’ve been in the early Nineties. I worked with Latin musicians, did a couple of records with those musicians and toured. Had a great time. It was pretty well-received in Latin America, which was a relief. But in the United States … As one of the executives at Warner Records said, “David, you are your own Yoko Ono.” Which is unfair to Yoko, but I knew what he meant. 

If you wanted to be a conceptual artist, maybe being your own Yoko Ono wasn’t so bad.
Exactly [laughs]. But he meant more like, “You have purposely alienated your audience.”

When did that start changing?
Probably about 10 years ago, something like that. Suddenly a younger generation started to be interested in the new things I was doing. It wasn’t just the people who grew up listening to Talking Heads. There was a whole other group that was listening. That changed things.

“You’d think at my age I’d know who I am. But we’ll never know.”

Lots of younger artists cite you as an influence today, from Lorde to Hayley Williams. They really look up to you. Are you comfortable being an object of hero worship?
I don’t like to think of myself that way, but if people like what I do, I’m not going to argue with that. I’m not going to have some psychological issue with it. But for the most part, I’m excited about what I’m doing at the moment, whether it’s a record or a tour or something else. And maybe that’s a big reason why some of these people like what I do. They see that I’ve gotten myself into a place where I have a certain amount of freedom to try things out and do different things, which is rare in the music world.

Your performance of “Burning Down the House” with Olivia Rodrigo was one of the coolest moments at Governors Ball this year. How did that come together?
I saw her show at Madison Square Garden months before. She’s a great performer, and she was having a really good time, you could tell. I got introduced to her afterwards, and she seemed like a real person — someone who, growing up in the world that she did, survived it really well. So then, out of nowhere, comes this invitation: “Hey, would you like to join me at Governors Ball?” My reaction was, “Yeah. And shall we figure out some choreography together?”

Which you did. You and she really had the moves down.
Yeah, yeah. We worked it out in a couple of days.

Did you ever get to work with an older artist you looked up to when you were younger?
Oh, yeah. When we were starting out, we were big fans of the Velvet Underground. John Cale and Lou Reed came to see us at CBGB. We met with Lou Reed a couple of times. He wanted to sign us to a management-production deal. But it was a little bit too much like, “Oh, I don’t know if we’re ready for this.” We pulled back. John introduced us to Brian Eno on our first trip to London, and that proved to be a big deal for us. All these people that we were in awe of.

What was Lou like?
We were playing through some of our songs, just strumming a guitar. And I remember he was showing us how if you slowed some of them down a little bit, that might not be the worst thing in the world, rather than trying to blurt out all the words really quickly. So, yeah, he had some good ideas. I remember when we met, he was eating an incredible amount of ice cream. I think he went through two of those quart containers of Häagen-Dazs ice cream in one sitting. We were like, “Whoa.”

You have a song on this album called “I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party,” which is another great title.
There were a few songs where it maybe had the first couple of lines, or maybe just the title. “I met the Buddha at a downtown party.” And I go, “OK, that’s like a short story. What happens next? What did he look like? What’d he say?” And so it starts to write itself. You just let it go and try and keep it interesting.

I have other ones that I never managed to turn into songs. There was one called “The 50-Foot Baby,” and the baby was wreaking havoc everywhere, just smashing things and picking up cars and tossing them around. Like Godzilla, but a baby. But I didn’t know exactly where to take it.

“If you do too much of the older material, you become a legacy act.”

Maybe for the next album.
Yeah. I’d never done that before, I don’t think. So that was new, writing these little stories.

You talk about writing these songs as a process of asking questions. Did you reach any conclusions?
I can’t think of any. The more I do this, the more questions there are. You go, “I thought I was going to get an answer.” And the door opens, or the curtain parts, and you go, “Oh, my God, it’s just a whole bunch more questions.” A whole bunch of more things that you don’t understand. And you wonder, am I ever going to get any of this figured out? Maybe not.

You’ve talked in the past about feeling different from other people, being neurodivergent or on a spectrum. Where’s your thinking on that now?
I think very, very little of that remains in me. But yes, at a certain age, I felt very socially awkward, uncomfortable. I was and still am able to focus on a song or drawing and just shut out everything else. I enjoy being with my friends, but there’s times when I’m alone and I’m OK with that, too. So, yeah, there’s elements that persist, and I’m OK with it, but it’s a lot less than it used to be. And some of that I think is just age. You change over years. Some of it I think is due to what music can do to you, whether it’s somebody else’s music or your own. Some of it’s working with other musicians and band members. That becomes this very healing social situation. And part of it is the joy of making music. That’s this big thing that pulls me out of it.

You made this new album with the producer Kid Harpoon, who’s known for making pop records with people like Harry Styles and Miley Cyrus. What made you want to work with someone like that?
I liked the sound of those records that he made. I know that the subjects I choose, the kind of songs I write, are not the same as a lot of those records. But at the same time, I feel that they’re still pop records. They adhere to a pop-music structure and sound, and they have choruses that you can sing along with. So why not? 

When you perform live, you’ve always got lots of musicians around you. That’s very different to how some pop stars perform now, with just a DJ or a small backing band.
Yeah, yeah. I saw Charli XCX, and it was just her onstage, no band, no dancers, nothing else. I thought, “Whoa, this is really brave.” Part of me was also going, “Wow, this is really economical, too.” But I don’t know if I’m ready to do that.

When Stop Making Sense was rereleased in September 2023, how did it feel for you to see your younger self onscreen?
When A24 was preparing to rerelease Stop Making Sense, I remember going to a screening to see the new print. I hadn’t seen it in years. I’m watching, thinking, “Who is that guy?” Sounds like the new record. But I’m looking and going, “He’s really serious. I feel like telling him to loosen up a little bit: ‘Take it easy, take it easy. It’s going to be OK.’” And by the end of the movie, he kind of does.

“At a certain age, I felt very awkward. The joy of music pulls me out of it.”

When you were promoting that rerelease, you spent more time with your old bandmates in Talking Heads than you had in a very long time.
That’s true, yeah.

What was that like for you, to be back with that group of people all those years later?
It was OK. We were all very proud of that show and the film that Jonathan Demme did. We’re thrilled that audiences still wanted to see it. So we put aside whatever differences we have. I said, “OK, we’re not going to go there, but we’re going to help promote this thing.”

Your bandmates said some unflattering things about you in the press before that. Tina did an interview in 2022 where she called you a bully and compared you to Trump. How did you get over that?
Mercifully, I didn’t read a lot of that stuff. I’d hear about it a little bit, like you just told me. I also know that there were periods when we made Stop Making Sense where I had this vision of what this show could be. And I probably wasn’t the easiest person in the world to work with, because I was very single-minded about “No, the lighting should be like this. And the crew has to rehearse wheeling those risers out so that they’re as much a part of the show as the band is.” It all worked, but I was not the easiest person to work with in those days. Now I know how to collaborate a little bit better. There’s a way to do it where it doesn’t hurt feelings.

In all that time you spent promoting the rerelease, were the four of you able to get back to some of the friendship that you had in the earliest days?
Did we feel more comfortable with one another? Yeah. We felt more comfortable with one another, but I’m just going to anticipate your next questions. I didn’t feel like, “Oh, yeah, let’s go out on tour again.” Or, “Let’s make another record.” Musically, I’ve gone to a very different place. And I also felt like there’s been a fair number of reunion records and tours. And some of them were probably pretty good. Not very many. It’s pretty much impossible to recapture where you were at that time in your life. For an audience … that was formative music for them at a particular time. They might persuade themselves that they can relive that, but you can’t.

Do you understand why people want a Talking Heads reunion?
I totally understand it. I’m a music fan like other people. And there’s artists that stopped working, or bands that broke up, that I heard at a period in my life where music was very important. Maybe I never heard it when it was happening, I missed it. I would love to see it live now. But you realize you can’t turn the clock back. When you hear music at a certain point in your life, it means a lot. But it doesn’t mean you can go back there and make it happen again.

You’re at a point in your career where some people might start thinking about a farewell tour or retirement. Is that something you think about?
No, I haven’t thought about it. I’ve thought about other things. Fred Armisen convinced me to try doing some stand-up, which I did unacknowledged, and it kind of worked. That is one of the scariest ever, because you’re just alone with words for the most part. I don’t know if I’m ready to go there, but you never know.

You actually went to a comedy club and did a stand-up set?
Yes, I did. It’s a thing that he organizes where he has guests but they’re not announced. And as with comedy clubs, nobody’s allowed to use their phones or anything like that.

So you can’t find it on YouTube?
Nope.