Wedding bells will be ringing soon for David Byrne. On Monday, the former Talking Heads frontman revealed that he’ll be tying the knot this week, just a few weeks after revealing that he is engaged to Mala Gaonkar, and also shared a playlist of instrumental songs that will play at his wedding dinner.
“I’m getting married this week and made an almost entirely instrumental playlist while our guests eat an amazing and spicy dinner,” Byrne wrote on Instagram, sharing a link to an Apple Music playlist. “My sense is that words and lyrics can be distracting – the ear goes to them, especially if it’s a song one knows.”
He added: “So, I opted for buoyant instrumentals that will create a hopeful and joyous atmosphere… and that folks can also ignore at the same time.”
The playlist includes 42 songs, and a focus on Latin music, including songs such as “Pa Japón” by El Alfa, “Perfidia” by Café Tacvba, “Chimborazo” and “Luz de Luna” by marimba-punk group Son Rompe Pera, “Canales” by Mexican Institute of Sound, and “En El Caribe Estoy Triste” by Meridian Brothers.
The playlist also features songs by Herbie Hancock, an instrumental version of Post Malone’s “Wow,” and Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent).”
Byrne revealed that he was engaged to Baonkar in an interview with The Times, while discussing the song “Moisturizing Things” from his upcoming album. “My fiancée will sometimes come at me with greasy hands, ready to smear my face. And at one point I thought, ‘What if I wake up and really looked younger?’” the musician said in the interview. “But there’s a message, too. About how people judge us by the way we look. You learn a lesson you didn’t expect at the start.”
Byrne and Gaonkar collaborated in 2016 for a theater performance at the Stanford Arts Institute; they later reconnected for a different theatrical experience in 2022. The pair has also attended numerous events, including the 2023 Oscars and the premiere of Dune: Part Two, together.
The new playlist and the wedding plan revelation come just a few days before he’s set to release his album Who Is the Sky? alongside the Ghost Train Orchestra.
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Byrne told Rolling Stone he called the album Who Is The Sky? because of a voice-to-text message that meant to ask “who is this guy?”
“The algorithm got it a little bit wrong,” he said. “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.’”
