If you’re hoping to see David Byrne reunite with his former bandmates in Talking Heads, you’re not alone — but you probably shouldn’t expect it to happen anytime soon. In his expansive new Rolling Stone Interview, Byrne let fans of his old band down gently.
“You can’t turn the clock back,” he told Rolling Stone. “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.”
Byrne is currently preparing to release an excellent new solo album called Who Is the Sky?, produced by Top 40 hitmaker Kid Harpoon. Speaking on the new album, which includes the singles “Everybody Laughs,” “She Explains Things to Me,” and “The Avant Garde,” he made it clear how excited he is by the creative work he’s doing right now.
Byrne raised the subject of a Talking Heads reunion himself, in response to a question about his experience promoting the A24 rerelease of their classic 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense last year with bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz, and multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison.
“Did we feel more comfortable with one another?” Byrne said, acknowledging that those TV and film-festival appearances were the most time he’d spent with the other three Talking Heads in years. “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.”
Talking Heads split up in 1991, and they have not performed in public since 2002, when they reunited for one night only at their induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Elsewhere in the interview, Byrne reflected on the ways he’s grown in the decades since they made Stop Making Sense.
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“I had this vision of what this show could be,” he said. “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 the rest of the interview, Byrne talked at length about writing his new album, living in New York in the 1970s, hanging out with Lou Reed, performing onstage with Olivia Rodrigo, how it feels to see younger generations embrace his music, and much more.
