David Byrne: Still Making Sense

David Byrne is a man who has it all. ‘All’ in this case being an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and several platinum albums with Talking Heads, the band he first emerged from. That’s not to mention a stellar solo career in the decades since then, which has resulted in (deep breath, everyone) a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony, a Golden Globe, Broadway musicals, multiple books, art installations, and even a couple of TED Talks to his name. 

With all that under his belt, you’d think the 73-year-old would be happy to rest on his laurels and bask in the well-deserved adulation. But it isn’t all sunshine and easy living. On the day we join him in his New York apartment via Zoom, he’s got a very tough decision to make – what on earth is he going to wear on his upcoming tour? “Today I tested out an outfit that was head-to-toe orange,” he says with a chuckle. “In the past I’ve worn a lot of grey, but this tour is gonna have a lot of colour. We spent quite a bit of time thinking about what shoes we’re going to wear, too. Dancers can be very particular about shoes, as you can imagine!”

David is a man who has grown into himself with age. Gone is the jerky, nervous, deer-in-the-headlights look of early interviews. The man in front of us today is constantly laughing, happy to hold forth on basically anything. When he joins the call, his thoughts turn to the medium itself. “Do you remember during the pandemic when people were recording performances on Zoom and all the musicians were in different windows? I never figured out how to do that. How did they all hear one another?” He throws his hands up with another baffled laugh. “There must have been other technology involved, I guess.”

Aside from needing a sounding board for outfit choices and Zoom queries, David has sequestered himself in his apartment’s music room to talk to us for the release of his new album, ‘Who Is the Sky?’. It’s not out when we chat, but has since become his fourth solo album to hit the Top 40 and reaffirmed his status as a vital force in music, nearly 50 years into his career. 

“Friends who have heard it say it’s a hopeful record,” he says, when asked what he wants people to take away from the latest entry in his expansive discography. “It’s very joyful and playful, which is maybe unexpected at this point in time, with the world how it is. I realised it’s maybe a kind of resistance to what’s going on in the world today – showing what is possible as opposed to wallowing in despair.

“I tend to be a fairly positive person, but I’m certainly not ignorant of what’s going on in the world, so sometimes I have to help myself along,” he adds, referencing his ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ project, which writes about positive news stories. “When you see these stories about people who have been successful in finding solutions to things, that helps me get out of the situation where I just sit there feeling ‘things are horrible, things are horrible, things are horrible’. They are horrible, but there’s good in there, too.”

This resistance to melancholy often manifests on ‘Who Is the Sky?’ as personal feelings and connections. David’s recent announcement that he was marrying his fiancée Mala Gaonkar was made after our interview, but it’s no stretch to imagine that a lot of the album’s emotional heft stems from this romance. ‘She Explains Things To Me’, the album’s second single, is framed as a song inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s book ‘Men Explain Things To Me’, about mansplaining. David turns this on its head in the song, instead focusing on how much he relies on women (and possibly his fiancée) to explain things to him – from films to poetry. “I often have to ask a woman: ‘How did you know what was going to happen in that movie?’” he says with a laugh. “Or there’s a poem and I just do not understand what it’s about! I know a few people who write poetry, and I feel like they might be disappointed that I sometimes have trouble understanding what they’re writing, but I suppose it’s about how it makes you feel rather than what it’s about, right?”

“It’s very joyful and playful, which is maybe unexpected at this point in time, with the world how it is”

Cluelessness on poetry is one thing we’ve probably all felt, but ‘She Explains Things to Me’ touches on an ignorance of subtext, which David says can spill over into the social, too. How, you ask? Well, let’s talk about eels. “I was at a dinner party with my fiancée and I’d been reading a book about eels,” he starts, smiling at the absurdity of the sentence. “Eels have a very strange and fascinating life, so I just started talking to someone I barely knew about them for what turned out to be quite a long time! Later on, my fiancée said, ‘Do you realise how strange that is?’ But you look at the Sargasso Sea and you realise ‘That’s what they do?! They go all the way there?’” He interrupts himself with yet another laugh. “So yeah, maybe it’s not just poetry and films.”

Absurdities of the lifecycle of the European eel aside, the song is a touching portrait of domesticity. Likewise, ‘A Door Called No’ tells a fable of a man whose world is opened up by a kiss from a woman, and ‘I’m an Outsider’ takes the point of view of a man trying to convince an unnamed person to let him into their mind. It’s not hard to join the dots and see the influence of new love all over the album.

Perhaps the most unambiguous love song on ‘Who Is the Sky?’ isn’t for a person at all, though. “The days of laughter and joy / When you held me in your arms” sings David, before taking a sharp left turn with the follow-up “Secure and safe within your halls / Free from fear and free from harm”. A glance at the song title explains the confusion, with ‘My Apartment is My Friend’ being an ode to the one place that sees us at our best and worst – our home.

“I tried to write a lot of songs during the pandemic, but nothing really worked out,” he explains. “There was one about being socially distanced and not seeing people properly because of their masks, but it didn’t go anywhere. I did a lot of drawings, but it was hard to write when it seemed so much bigger than any songs. The ambulances are around the corner of my street waiting for a call, which is a little bit hard to write a song about.

“The only one that did work is the apartment one. I spent a lot of time here, drawing and cooking and watching old movies and the things people did. The apartment became… not a lover, but it was sheltering and holding me, and I became very comfortable with it. I toyed with the idea of changing the title to make it less obvious what it was about, but I eventually thought it was maybe more intriguing to have it right there in the title – to grab people and make them think, ‘What? I want to know what that is about!’”

“I guess that is a strange thing to write about, thinking about it now…”

Songs about the nurturing embrace of bricks and mortar feel like the logical evolution of a career which has always had a bit of an obsession with buildings. Right from Talking Heads’ debut album cut ‘Don’t Worry About the Government’, where he picks a building to live in and invites his friends over, through to 2008’s ‘Strange Overtones’, with its opening lyrics about a next-door neighbour heard through the walls of an apartment, this is a man who has always had an affinity for the manmade.

Another recurring theme across his career has been a refusal to be bound by the rules of what constitutes a good topic for a song. Last album ‘American Utopia’ had lyrics about the hardness of a chicken’s kiss (‘Everyday is a Miracle’) and a song about what it’s like to be a dog (‘Dog’s Mind’). This time around? What if a moisturiser worked a bit too well? On ‘Moisturising Thing’, David has the answer.

“My fiancé often reminds me to put on moisturiser,” he explains. “Which I do, but I do wonder if it really works. What if it did work and I woke up one morning and looked noticeably younger? So I exaggerated it for a song. And I can get more rhymes out of the word three than maybe 16 or 18 or something like that, it’s a little bit easier to fit into a song, even though it’s a little unrealistic, so that’s what I wrote about.

“I guess that is a strange thing to write about, thinking about it now, but why has no one else written a song about a moisturiser? I was a little bit worried when Wet Leg came out with a record called ‘Moisturizer’ – I thought ‘Oh, I’m in trouble now!’” he says with mock terror. “There’s a lot of breakup songs, a lot of songs about social anxiety, but I can’t write about those things. I listen, and it just makes me think the person has been spending too much time on social media and is maybe a little too aware of what other people think of them, which is not how I live my life.

“When I was younger, a lot of the music I was drawn to was eclectic in what it covered. I realised people could write songs about anything. It’s possible to write a pop song in form, but one that doesn’t stay with the typical subjects. That gave me the freedom to think that if I have an idea, there’s no reason not to give it a try.

“When I finish a record, I’ll listen to it and then I’ll check what the top streaming songs are and see where my music fits in. This one – I don’t see where it fits in. I think people will like it, but I don’t think it gels with the typical songwriting subjects. Not that it worries me, if I was concerned, I’d probably have checked before I wrote the songs!”

“I was a little bit worried when Wet Leg came out with a record called ‘Moisturizer’. I thought ‘Oh, I’m in trouble now!’”

Freeing as it may be, David wrote in his 2012 book How Music Works about how the limitations of ability and environment are a necessary – at times even vital – part of the songwriting process. Music for churches sounds the way it does precisely because of the space it’s designed to inhabit. Likewise, early Talking Heads songs were limited by CBGB, the New York dive bar they were performed in. If limitation is crucial, how does a man who feels free to write about anything and is respected enough to play music anywhere manage to pump those creative brakes?

One shaper of his sound has been his frequent collaborations with other musicians. Pitchfork once said he’d collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos, which was probably meant to be an insult, but who could turn down a free packet of crisps? There’s no word from David on whether New York-based ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra offered a packet of tangy cheese tortilla chips when he invited them on board for ‘Who Is the Sky?’, but their input was fundamental to the album.

“I started writing songs here,” David says, gesturing at his apartment. “Just me playing an acoustic guitar over a loop or a beat, really stripped down. I didn’t even think about the final sound, but when I heard Ghost Train’s ‘Music of Moondog’ album, I knew that’s what I wanted it to sound like, with maybe a dash of pop music added in. It felt like taking a plunge, because I decided on the sound of the whole record, but I think it really works. From there, it was a back and forth between their arrangements and [album producer] Kid Harpoon and me intervening with suggestions – shifting things around so they didn’t get in the way of the vocal and could really shine, stuff like that.

“Alongside Ghost Train Orchestra’s input, both Kid Harpoon and I thought it’d be good to have some other singers on there besides me. I’d covered one of Hayley Williams’ [y’know, the one from Paramore, heard of her? – Ed.] songs, which was a great experience. We kept the communication going, and I was in her town finishing up the record, and she agreed to contribute to it.”

That initial cover David refers to was his version of Paramore’s ‘Hard Times’, released alongside a Paramore version of ‘Burning Down The House’. It was a creative back-and-forth kicked off by the ‘Everybody’s Getting Involved’ album, which tied in with the rerelease of Talking Heads’ iconic Stop Making Sense concert film. Never one for navel-gazing nostalgia, David is reticent to delve too deeply into his days in Talking Heads – us bringing up the ‘Stop Making Sense’ remaster is the only time he takes pause, measuring his words as he says them.

“The other Talking Heads and I are very, very proud of that film,” he begins, before breaking off. “I find that it’s a bit of walking the line with this stuff. I’m always wary of diving into the past too much because then I’m in danger of becoming a legacy act who only ever talks about the good old days, whatever they may be. But it’s something we’re very happy with, so I didn’t mind promoting it so much. Mainly because in the back of my mind I knew that a few months afterwards I’d be talking about a new record and not just staying in the past.”

It’s this kind of anti-nostalgia that saw David playing salsa-inspired album ‘Rei Momo’ to bemused Talking Heads fans across America in the 90s. These days, lessons have been learned and the setlist for recent tours has been peppered with Talking Heads classics alongside solo material. This blending of old and new was the driving force behind the mammoth success of his ‘American Utopia’ tour and Broadway show, which started in mid-sized venues and ended up filling arenas. “I have to be faithful enough to the old classics that they’re recognisable, but it doesn’t feel like I’m trotting out the hits,” says David, enthusiastically explaining his plans for the tour set-up this time around.

“I enjoy touring. I’ve done it long enough that I know how to do it humanely. I can tour and keep my sanity,” he laughs. “So once I’d decided it was time to do it again, I started thinking about what that looks like. The vision is to keep all the musicians and dances mobile, like we did on the ‘American Utopia’ tour – I’m not ready to go back to having the musicians planted and immobile yet. But this time around, we’re playing with the idea of using projections to put us in different places – a forest or a street or an apartment. It should be a lot of fun, but now we’re figuring out the specifics. Is there a story? The ‘American Utopia’ show started off without any structure in that sense, but it emerged as time went on. By the time we moved the show to Broadway, I was doing a lot more talking to thread it all together. Right now, I’m asking myself: ‘What am I saying? What is this show about?’ I don’t know yet. It reveals itself when you put it all together.”

Taken from the November 2025 issue of Dork. David Byrne’s album ‘Who Is the Sky?’ is out now.