David Byrne: Head in the Clouds

David Byrne is driven by curiosity. It’s the constant that has shaped his career – from the neurotic art-rock groove of Talking Heads and his founding of the label Luaka Bop to recent collaborations with Hayley Williams and Mitski. His latest solo album, Who Is the Sky?, reveals an artist who can’t, won’t keep still.

One hot summer afternoon, David Byrne talks to me about sneakers. “I was thinking: What kind of shoes can we wear?” A new tour is on the horizon, and he’s examining the details. “I found some that are running shoes on the bottom, and the top is like a sock. I thought they looked great because they were the matching colour of our outfits, and they look sleek and simple.” He nods at me, confirming these are reasonable criteria. “And one of the dancers said, ‘I’ve tried those and in them my foot is going to slide and my ankle is going to twist.’” Byrne laughs, bemused at how these little details mean big things to different people. “Part of all this is just listening. They’ll tell you what is going to work or not. Right?”

If, as David Byrne famously sang some 46 years ago, “Heaven is a place where nothing really happens,” his idea of utopia might be the opposite: not a milquetoast biblical waiting room but a stage full of old and new friends, playing old and new instruments, singing old and new songs. Listening to each other. In the past few years, he’s looked back a little, briefly reuniting with Talking Heads for a talk-show circuit tour. But mostly, he’s looked ahead, resuming his usual breakneck speed of collaborations in songs with Mitski, St Vincent and Montaigne, and earning an Oscar nomination for the track This Is a Life, with Son Lux and Mitski – aptly, for the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. He remains a local fixture at shows and openings around New York City, recently joining the city’s all-female brass band, Brass Queens, to sing the Heads classic This Must Be the Place at Brooklyn’s crucial queer performance hub C’mon Everybody. His new album, Who Is the Sky?, comes out this month. He’s also composed a suite of songs for an animated adaption of Roald Dahl’s The Twits, including a track with Paramore’s Hayley Williams, who appears on the new album.

Today, we’re in his brand-new office. Tables are stacked with books, perhaps still destined for the ample shelves in the waiting area. Art is yet to be hung, although the chimpanzee painting that graced the cover of the Heads’ 1988 album Naked looks over us proudly. In between talking to me about testing out speakers, he’ll get fitted for new earpieces he and his band will wear on the tour. The better they hear each other, the better the show will be. “I don’t want to give up on the fact of everybody being mobile,” he says. And while he means he wants his fellow performers to be free to dance around with him on stage, after almost 50 years in the business, David Byrne also means to refuse to stay still.

In 2018, he triumphantly resumed his solo career with American Utopia, an elegant foundation of his signature wide-eyed pop songs about empathy and wise fools. To embody these musings, he assembled a dozen compatriots in matching grey suits who, alongside him, danced and sang and triggered MIDI instruments, and banged on acoustic ones. If you saw the American Utopia tour, you’d never seen anything quite like its meld of high-tech gizmos and no-tech humanity. About a year after the tour wrapped up, a kind of platonic ideal of its choreographed joy opened, to rave reviews, on Broadway. It played for five months and was captured on film by Spike Lee in a spry and vivid HBO documentary. American Utopia was a monument to collective creativity – a project that seemed to get better the more people became involved. It was a kind of artistic proof that, with work, more perfect unions (of sight and sound, of performer and audience, of bodies and hearts and minds) are possible.

American Utopia closed on 16 February, 2020, paused by Covid, along with so much of the world. Apart from a February performance on Saturday Night Live, Byrne mostly rode out the lockdown in his apartment. “I watched a lot of movies. The creature comforts,” he says. “A bed, a kitchen. I learned to cook different things. There was no one to eat it but me, so if the dish wasn’t so good, no one would know.” He laughs. “And if it was good, then I could go cook it for someone.” Hopefully, eventually. 

He wasn’t writing much. “I think I felt like anything I wrote was going to be inappropriate or insignificant compared to what we were all going through,” he says. “I did a lot of drawings, but I didn’t write any songs.” Instead, he found comfort in habit. Famous for pulling up on his bicycle to concerts and art openings around the city, he began cycling again, often with his tour bandmates. “We’d come back to our apartments through Times Square, and there was nobody there. A few of the neon signs were still blinking. A little group of tourists had just arrived at a tourist attraction and realised, oh, this is not happening. And we were like: sorry…”

Soon, the city began opening back up. American Utopia returned to Broadway for half a year. Making dinner for friends became possible again. “After some semblance of normal life returned,” he says, “the songs started coming out pretty quickly.” They weren’t necessarily direct responses to the pandemic, more sketches of what was on his mind. Premises. Starting points. “I had a little voice recorder app on my phone,” he says, “and I’d figure out the melody for a first verse, record it so I didn’t forget it, and write down the chords. There’s the premise. I’d put it away, and bring it out a week later and go: OK, what’s the next part? And do that over and over until it got refined into a song.” Things were taking shape.

In 2023, his friend Joan As Police Woman performed the music of experimental composer Moondog with New York City’s Ghost Train Orchestra at Brooklyn’s avant-garde hub Roulette. Byrne sat in with the band when Rufus Wainwright couldn’t make it. They all hit it off. “I like the way they sounded, this mixture of orchestral stuff and guitars,” he says, “and I thought that might be what the songs I’d been writing should sound like.” 

GTO leader Brian Carpenter invited Byrne to their rehearsal space in Chinatown. “We all remember exactly where we were when we first heard Talking Heads – that voice, it’s so impressive, with a sense of beautiful urgency,” Carpenter says. “But in his solo career, there’s so much detail put into those worlds and their arrangements. So I expected he would have a very high bar, and would be able to express his ideas clearly.” That turned out to be true, but, as usual, in his personal, inimitable, collaborative way. 

David Byrne, of course, is primarily known for his work as one member of Talking Heads, a contentious family of four whose most enduring accomplishments were born of collaboration: 1979’s Fear of Music and 1980’s Remain in Light, for example, juxtaposed the band’s uptight nature with producer Brian Eno’s faith in intuition and chance. With help from Jonathan Demme, 1984’s Stop Making Sense reinvented the concert film, and in 2023 the band awkwardly reunited to promote its fine remastering. But even as a solo artist, Byrne was rarely alone. His 1981 album with Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, is a landmark of sample-based composition; his magnificent 1987 soundtrack The Last Emperor, made with Ryuichi Sakamoto, remains a high point of both their careers. In 2009, he began an ongoing music partnership with St Vincent, launched by the 2012 album, Love This Giant, which sounded more angular and energised than either artist had for a while. Then there’s Luaka Bop, the label he founded in 1989, which has brought everyone from William Onyeabor and Os Mutantes to Alice Coltrane’s ashram tapes to more mainstream audiences. There’s also his work with Celia Cruz, his performances with Robyn, and the floor-filling ode to lounging around, Lazy, made into a house classic with X-Press 2. Byrne is at his best with others, spinning his curiosity about other people into collaborations with them. 

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This holds true for Who Is the Sky?, Byrne’s first solo release since American Utopia. It’s a relaxed, funny record, exemplified by first single Everybody Laughs, which is stocked with bemused observations – some about our common humanity (“Everybody’s backside, everybody’s front”) and others universal in their specificity (“Everybody’s going through the garbage/ looking for inspiration”). Perhaps oddly, for a series of songs that rely heavily on the serious compositional chops of professional classical musicians, the album sounds loose, too. This is mostly due to their genesis as basement jams. After their initial meeting, Byrne sent the Ghost Train Orchestra some demos of him singing over acoustic guitars and the occasional drum loop. “He kept things purposefully open to our imagination,” Carpenter says. In his office, Byrne agrees with the idea, shrugging casually. “They play together like a band, as opposed to a bunch of players who barely know each other. So I thought, well, they’re going to know what they do best.” As he has throughout his career, Byrne looked for the talent and, when he found it, let it be. “I approached them not just to play,” he says, “but to write the arrangements for themselves.” 

Flights of clarinet, strings and rattling percussion took root. “I think he liked that we are a miniature orchestra,” Carpenter says, “with a malleability of instrumentation that allows you to go in all these different worlds. But also, that we’re a band that’s been together for almost 20 years, with our own way of working. So he was getting all these built-in mechanics to tap into. He trusted us, which was an amazing thing.” 

Everyone was having a ball. Byrne, however, was a little worried about the project becoming too self-serious. “That wasn’t the story I wanted to tell: legacy artist does his obligatory orchestral record.” He rolls his eyes. Nostalgia might be one of the few quintessentially American emotions Byrne has no interest in. I ask him if reuniting with Talking Heads made him see those records differently. He thinks for a while, saying nothing. I ask him if streaming media’s presentation of his entire career on a single platform frees him from the burden of legacy. He perks up. “This younger generation of listeners, they might pick out a Talking Heads song, and it might be one that is really well known,” he says. “But they might pick out something else I’ve done recently. So who knows? Mix it together!”

His own listening habits formed the path to Who Is the Sky? “I was thinking about the records I’d heard recently that sounded really good,” he continues. “Maggie Rogers, who I’d crossed paths with. Miley Cyrus, her too. Those were produced by this guy, Kid Harpoon. And then I met him at a birthday party that night.” 

Harpoon had indeed worked with Maggie Rogers, writing and producing much of her 2022 album Surrender, and with Cyrus, whose smash hit Flowers he’d played on and co-produced – though he might be best known for co-producing Harry Styles’ 2022 blockbuster Harry’s House. “David has been a touchstone for me throughout my life,” Harpoon says via email. “The way he works and fearlessly shifts direction has been unbelievably inspiring.” They struck up a conversation after the party Byrne mentions. “Basically, he said, ‘I have these songs, and I have the concept of doing them with this great orchestra from Brooklyn. But there are a lot of them and only one of me, so I need some help.’”

Byrne sent Harpoon a demo of a song that would become the album track Moisturizing Thing. “I went to a drugstore to buy a new moisturiser,” Byrne says. “My fiancée is adamant about me applying one at the end of the day. I thought, but what if this stuff really works? What if I woke up and looked a lot younger? That would show her!” He laughs. “It was the beginning of a little parable.”

Its demo marked the start of his work with Harpoon. “It was a drum loop, guitar and vocal,” Harpoon says, “and it contained everything you needed to know about where we’re heading.” Which was, as is often the case with Byrne, towards the beat. “Kid said to me, ‘you have a strong sense of rhythm and we have to be aware of that,’” Byrne says. “‘The groove is what we should go for.’” He began recording the rehearsals, and then Byrne, Harpoon and Carpenter would meet on Zoom. “We could have gone in so many directions,” Carpenter says. “We would have totally different intros, versions of choruses. Once David brought in Kid Harpoon, that opened up other avenues. We three would get on the call and work together to craft these songs.”

But not overwork them. The grace of Who Is the Sky? can be found in its light touch. Album highlight My Apartment Is My Friend is the most overtly Covid-era song. “He referred to it as a pandemic song,” Carpenter says, “and so [trombonist] Curtis Hasselbring wrote this whole instrumental that takes the listener on a journey. He was very vocal about wanting that.” The journey moves through fleet-footed mallet percussion, plucky harp melodies, sweeping strings, sunset-hued horn charts. It’s a three-minute epic. “It was all about making sure we kept the magic the arrangers were coming up with,” Harpoon says, “while making the David part of the record balance out the GTO part.” Thematically, the song is an equally tricky balancing act. At first blush, it’s a love song. “The days of laughter and joy when you held me in your arms,” Byrne croons. It then becomes clear that the object of his affection is, in fact, an object. “Secure and safe within your halls/ free from fear and free from harm,” he sings. The song precisely captures how much a home meant to those of us lucky enough to have one during the pandemic, or period – but, like many of us after lockdown, the song steps out to face the larger world. “Between the walls and windows/ we’re connected,” he continues. It sounds like he’s singing about America again –  right now, in its terrible state – and about the perils of mistaking your home as yours alone.

“It’s a love song,” he says. And a perfect synecdoche of Byrne’s whole thing. “I make pop records, yeah?” he asks, with the same bemused but quizzical tone he used when asking about the show – maybe because it’s the same sort of strategy. There’s meaning in the everyday if you listen for it. Today, post-Utopia, many of us are obsessed with the objects around us but overlook what they might mean and what can be made of and with them. Luckily, Byrne hasn’t given up on the search. “I like the sense of a pop song,” he says, nodding as if he’s made a decision. “And I like to stretch the definition of what can be written about in a pop song. What can you get away with?” And with that, he gets back to work.  

Who Is the Sky? is out 5 September on Matador
Become a Supporter for the chance to win tickets to David Byrne’s London show on 15 March 2026