It quickly became clear that Byrne was looking to do more than sing a Moondog tune.
“I really liked the Moondog record, and I figured this is a good chance for me to kind of get to know them, to see how they work,” Byrne said.
Within days, Byrne suggested that Ghost Train Orchestra should be the band on the record he was making. The result is the new album “Who Is The Sky?,” which arrived in early September. Byrne and his ensemble bring the project to the Boch Center Wang Theatre Oct. 2-4, followed by an appearance at Providence’s Veterans Memorial Auditorium Oct. 5.
“I like how they have an orchestra sound, but they also have bass, drums, and guitar,” Byrne said via Zoom from the New York home that inspired “My Apartment Is My Friend,” one of the songs on the record.
Byrne also asked Ghost Train Orchestra to do the arrangements of the songs for the album, noting, “I figured that they would know their own strengths and weaknesses.”
One of the songs, “Everybody Laughs,” was arranged by trombonist ​​Curtis Hasselbring, a New England Conservatory graduate whose time in Boston also included playing with the storied Boston jazz group Either/Orchestra and Boston saxophonist Charlie Kohlhase.
“They came up with this instrumental passage that happens twice in the song, and it really lifted that section of the song up. It tells you ‘This is a celebration,’” Byrne said. “So the music is doing more than just supporting me. It tells its own story.”
“That’s the beauty of using a band as opposed to random session musicians,” added Carpenter, who said that Byrne biked to the group’s rehearsals for months before the album was recorded. “You already have built-in mechanics and chemistry.”
Carpenter has lived in Boston for 25 years, but the rest of the band, including Massachusetts-raised banjo and guitar player Brandon Seabrook, is based in New York. Over the years, Carpenter’s constant and imaginative creativity have yielded other Boston-based groups, including Beat Circus and the Confessions, and he hosts a weekly WZBC show called “Free Association.”
In his various outfits, Carpenter can be found playing trumpet and harmonica, singing, arranging, and composing. Much of the music he plays on the radio and on stage could be labeled as avant-garde. Byrne looks at that particular world in his song “The Avant Garde,” where he muses, “Now I like the idea, their politics too/ But I’m not really sure if that means that it’s good.”
“The song may sound like it’s being very critical, but it’s actually not,” Byrne explained. “I’ll go see something, whether it’s a theater performance or a music thing or dance, sometimes knowing very little [about it]. So it’s kind of a high risk.”
Like with “American Utopia,” Byrne devotes “Who Is The Sky?” to often off-beat and cheerful music regardless of the social and political environment. One song, “Moisturizing Thing,” imagines an anti-aging skin product that works so well it makes someone of Byrne’s age look like an infant. Another, “A Door Called No,” was inspired by a sign he saw on a door in a public space.
“It just said ‘No,’ and I thought ‘That’s a song title,’” he said. “It could be about racism or different exclusionary parts of society … but it’s not necessarily about going into that door, but about finding a completely different way of looking at things.”
Byrne’s dedication to looking on the bright side includes his digital news outlet Reasons to be Cheerful. A recent post celebrated a Boston cargo bike share.
“In some ways, things are not good at all, and there’s a lot to be concerned about,” he said. “But it is also true that we’ve evolved to be attracted to negative news more than anything positive.”
“Our readership is up, our memberships are up,” he added. “People actually need that kind of news more than they ever did.”
Ghost Train Orchestra was originally organized as part of an event that celebrated the 90th birthday of the Regent Theatre in Arlington, where Carpenter lives. The group’s first records drew on the sounds and repertoires of early jazz bands, but Carpenter said that “Songs and Symphoniques” marked a new direction for the band. Its next project, which premieres at Roulette in Brooklyn in November, is “CITIES,” which Carpenter described as a “musical travelogue” of pieces composed by group members that were inspired by urban locales around the world, such as Beijing and Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, Byrne is embarking on a tour supporting “Who Is The Sky?” that will find him and his ensemble of dancers and musicians using wireless technology that allows them to be fully mobile on stage. It’s an approach he started with “American Utopia.”
“I didn’t realize that that would kind of democratize the performance experience — all the musicians can come to the front,” he said. “Now that I’ve figured out how we can all be kind of liberated from that, it would be hard to go back.”
And don’t be surprised if you see a familiar shock of white hair riding in a Boston bike lane. Byrne noted that his touring gear will yet again include folding cycles for the ensemble members to ride in each city they perform in: “We’re bringing the bikes!”
DAVID BYRNE