Copyright newyorker
That June afternoon, as Byrne and I waited for a ferry outside the Battery Maritime Building, we bought cups of sliced mango from a street vender and watched a dance crew work the crowd for tips. Byrne has been biking around the city since the early eighties. In 2008, he designed a series of whimsical bike racks—one shaped like a high-heeled shoe, one like a dollar sign, one like a dog—that were installed in Manhattan and Brooklyn. He still feels exhilarated when he rides. “I stuck with it, despite the aura of uncoolness and the danger,” he wrote in his book “Bicycle Diaries,” published in 2009. “It just felt good to cruise down the dirty potholed streets.” A few years ago, Byrne repurposed an abandoned U.S. Army clubhouse on Governors Island as a rehearsal space for “Theater of the Mind,” an immersive experience about the plasticity of cognition, which recently completed a run at York Street Yards, in Denver, and which will open in Chicago in March. Byrne thinks a lot about the psychogeography of New York City and its abandoned places. In 2008, he transformed an empty hangar at the ferry terminal into a booming and dissonant musical instrument, an installation that he called “Playing the Building.” “I had an idea that I could mechanically make sounds from the infrastructure of an old building—exposed pipes, exposed radiators, girders that support things, whatever,” he said. He had gutted an old pump organ and retrofitted the keys so that they activated various mechanical devices. There was no amplification beyond the terminal’s own strange acoustics. Visitors were invited to mess around with the organ as they pleased. “Hit this key and a hammer comes down and blows air through a pipe—hit a different key, something else happens,” he said. “People would come and say, ‘I’m not a musician,’ then they’d see little kids start to play, and go, ‘Well, if they can do it, then I can do it.’ I thought it would be about revealing the inherent sound of the building, but once it was installed I realized, no, it’s actually about the people, about enabling creativity.” Byrne is not without affect, or energy, or enthusiasm—he laughs often, tossing his head back and letting out a big, chewy guffaw, sometimes in response to something funny, other times for largely indiscernible reasons—but I also noticed that there’s a preternatural quietude about him. Byrne’s musical career has been marked by experimentation and intensity, first as the front man of Talking Heads, the new-wave band that he started in 1975 with the drummer Chris Frantz and the bassist Tina Weymouth, two friends from art school, and then as a solo artist. Yet there’s a stillness at its center. Take the song “Slippery People,” from “Speaking in Tongues,” Talking Heads’ fifth album, released in 1983. It has some gospel fervor—the chorus is a call-and-response: “What’s the matter with him? (He’s alright) / How do you know? (The Lord won’t mind)”—and a starched, funky beat, but it’s also rickety and slow, like a fawn trying to stand up for the first time. Even the earliest Talking Heads tunes contain an uncanny, almost alien quality. Though the swagger and cockalorum of much of the band’s art-rock cohort was easily replicable (hunt down some safety pins and leather, get a chaotic haircut), Byrne’s particular individuality proved harder to emulate, which is perhaps why there’s no other American band so highly regarded but so rarely imitated. In the past, Byrne has suggested that he has a “very mild” form of Asperger’s syndrome, though he has never been formally assessed or diagnosed, and he believes that his symptoms have waned as he has aged. “I think there were times when I realized that I wasn’t perceiving things a hundred per cent the way that other people were,” he told me one day over lunch. But he came to consider his singularity to be part of the human condition, the way our desires and biases render us unique, aberrant, perfect. Byrne was born in Scotland in 1952. “Being an immigrant myself and having immigrant parents, I realized, Oh, we don’t all share the same little cultural things,” he said. “We eat differently, or we listen to different kinds of music, or we hold our knives and forks in different ways. Everybody’s not the same.” Byrne is generous with his time and attention, but there’s also a Warholian air of mystery about him—a gentle impenetrability, a feeling of separateness. “David is not one to reveal his innermost secrets,” Frantz told me. In 2012, Byrne and Annie Clark, who records as St. Vincent, worked together on “Love This Giant,” an elastic, outré pop record. “There’s an off-kilter kindness to him,” Clark said. “You’re not necessarily gonna get a direct ‘I love you.’ But what you do get is better. It takes him getting to know you, then you start to decode these really sweet gestures.” She went on, “In some ways, you can trust it more than somebody who’s over-the-top, razzle-dazzle gregarious. You have to earn it, and you get to it slowly, but it’s so incredibly rewarding and generative.” Byrne’s music has grown increasingly earnest over the years, but it is still almost always about alienation. Conversely, it is also about searching for home—how to find synchronicity, peace, wholeness. In September, Byrne married Mala Gaonkar, who founded SurgoCap, a wildly successful hedge fund. (Gaonkar started SurgoCap with $1.8 billion under management, the largest opening ever for a hedge fund run by a woman.) They were introduced by their mutual friend Brian Eno, who produced several Talking Heads records; “Theater of the Mind” was born from their early conversations. (Gaonkar is a co-creator of the show.) “We’d have these long walks and talks—the subjects ranged all over the place,” Byrne recalled. “And I thought, Wow, this person’s really different from a lot of my other friends. And I would like to do this again.” Byrne was married once before, to the costume designer and artist Adelle Lutz. (They have a daughter, Malu Byrne, born in 1989, and two grandchildren.) “I said I would never get married again, after I got divorced,” Byrne admitted, laughing. He demurred when I suggested that marriage was in fact a very passionate gesture. “It was just working out really well, so we said, ‘Well, let’s do this for our friends and family,’ ” he told me. A few days before the wedding, Byrne and I met up at his office, a bright, loftlike space near Union Square. One wall was covered floor to ceiling with banana-yellow shelves, stuffed with books, records, and ephemera (two cans of Spam; a captain’s hat; an Oscar, which Byrne won in 1988 for a score that he wrote, with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su, for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor”). A side table held an enormous Rolodex. On “What Is the Reason for It?,” a new song featuring Hayley Williams, of Paramore, Byrne wonders about the purpose and nature of love. “Does it do something useful? / What is it for? / Is everyone else the same as me?” he sings, his voice wobbly, plaintive. (He asked similar questions on Talking Heads’ “I’m Not in Love,” a cut from the 1978 album “More Songs About Buildings and Food”: “What does it take to fall in love? / Do people really fall in love?”) “We keep coming up with theories that it’s a biological imperative, or that it allows us to bond and raise children, very practical things like that. That doesn’t explain everything, though,” Byrne said. “When it happens, you really feel like you’re a different person. You feel different physically. It’s this amazing thing.” He added, “It’s not just about dating. There are places that we love. You may have a very strong emotional bond to a house.” On another new song, “My Apartment Is My Friend,” Byrne sings of his current home in Chelsea, where he rode out part of the pandemic: “You held me in your arms / Secure and safe within your halls / Free from fear and free from harm.” (Byrne has said that one of his favorite Willie Nelson tunes is “Hello Walls,” in which a lonesome Nelson asks, “Hello, walls / How’d things go for you today?”) Byrne turned seventy-three this year, but he is still curious about what it means to be alive. “I feel like asking the questions doesn’t immediately give you the answer, but just asking puts you in a different frame of mind,” he said. “You start to go—we really don’t know. We really don’t know what it’s about.” Byrne’s lyrics are famously inquisitive. On “Once in a Lifetime”—co-written with Eno, and a frequent entry on lists of the greatest songs of all time—he questions almost everything. The fourth verse builds to a kind of hysterical climax: You may ask yourself, What is that beautiful house? You may ask yourself, Where does that highway go to? And you may ask yourself, Am I right, am I wrong? And you may say to yourself, My God, what have I done? The club was comfortable for Byrne, who was then twenty-three and still figuring out a future. In 1970, after graduating from high school in Arbutus, Maryland, Byrne had moved to Providence to study at the Rhode Island School of Design. A year later, he transferred to the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore. “I ended up being there for maybe a year, year and a half,” Byrne said. “Then I hitchhiked and bummed around the country before going back to Providence. It was kind of a little scene there. I thought, Oh, this is pretty cool, there’s bands and artists. I can be part of that.” Frantz said, “I didn’t get to know David until after he quit RISD and then returned to Providence.” (Frantz and Weymouth started dating as undergraduates; they’ve now been married for forty-eight years.) “A mutual friend asked us to record some music for a student film he was making about his girlfriend getting run over by a car. We did this in Tina’s apartment, where she had kindly been letting me keep my drums. I thought David was an interesting rhythm guitarist and had a high degree of je ne sais quoi, so I asked him to join a band I was forming, called the Artistics.” After graduation, Byrne, Frantz, and Weymouth all moved to New York. Byrne arrived first. “My ambition was to be an artist that would show in galleries,” he said. “I was enamored with the contemporary-arts scene at the time, especially conceptual art. I got room and board from this painter who had a loft on Bond Street, right next to Bowery, in exchange for helping him sand the floors, paint the place, that kind of stuff. I also got a part-time job as a movie-theatre usher.” Byrne, Frantz, and Weymouth eventually moved into a loft together, on Chrystie Street, near CBGB. It’s possible to excavate grainy black-and-white footage of one of the band’s earliest appearances, from the summer of 1975. “We’re the Talking Heads,” Byrne says. Long pause. “The first song we’re gonna do is called ‘The Girls Want to Be with the Girls.’ ” Byrne is dressed as though he files briefs at a law firm, in dark slacks and a collared shirt. In “Remain in Love,” a memoir published in 2020, Frantz wrote, “For the longest time people called us preppy because I would often wear the clothes my mom had given me for Christmas, and she did like to buy at Brooks Brothers. . . . We were not afraid to appear straight.” “We wanted that Everyman look that, in Chris’s and my case, was inspired by working people’s clothes,” Weymouth said. “Jeans and button-down shirts were our American answer to Mao and his Chinese two-piece outfits. David initially chose to wear polyester clothing, which he abandoned early on as uncomfortable and smelly. When a journalist incorrectly wrote something to the effect that he wore ‘Hush Puppies shoes that looked like industrial waste,’ he went out and bought a pair.” Frantz added, “We knew we couldn’t beat David Bowie, T. Rex, or the New York Dolls at their own game. Style was important to us, but rock-and-roll style was not.” Byrne later described the group in those early days as less a band than “an outline for a band.” He didn’t worry much about musicianship. “Some of us were sort of competent musicians, but that wasn’t something that we held in great esteem,” he said. “I remember when the Police appeared, we thought, Oh, this is unfair. They’re really good. We were guided more by our feelings, by our aesthetic choices, which may have made us seem a little bit cold. But so was everyone else. It’d be hard to deny that the Ramones were a conceptual band.” He added, “As intense and fun as they were, the Ramones were also an idea.” For years, there was a rumor circulating that Johnny Ramone wanted Talking Heads as an opener because he thought they were so weird and terrible that they would make the Ramones look good. Yet, almost immediately, Talking Heads pulled crowds. “We were incredibly lucky,” Byrne recalled. “I think we played a handful of shows, really, and suddenly there was an article about the scene in the Village Voice, and we were on the cover.” That piece, by the critic James Wolcott, ran with the headline “A Conservative Impulse in the New Rock Underground.” Wolcott described the scene at CBGB as “a counterthrust to the prevailing baroque theatricality of rock,” Talking Heads as “presenting a banal façade under which run ripples of violence and squalls of frustration,” and Byrne as having “a little-boy-lost-at-the-zoo voice and the demeanor of someone who’s spent the last half hour whirling around in a spin dryer.” Part of the “conservatism” that Wolcott cited was surely tangled up in Byrne’s self-awareness and his developing preference for stylized choreography over the kind of visceral, reactive pageantry synonymous with punk. In 1973, at Max’s Kansas City, Iggy Pop tumbled to the floor and gashed his chest open while performing with the Stooges; he kept singing, squirting blood. Credibility was tied to ideas of violence, rebellion, bodily sacrifice. Byrne’s vibe could not have been more different. Alan Vega, of Suicide, once complained of Byrne, “He wasn’t performing up there, he was just going through the motions. He didn’t make any twitchy gestures without something in his head saying, ‘Make a twitchy gesture now.’ ” “I sensed that, Oh, not everybody’s gonna like this. Some people are gonna think, This is very inauthentic. You’re not being true to yourself. It’s too show-bizzy,” Byrne said. “Totally understandable, because punk emerged out of a kind of counter-sensibility, a resistance to the slick stuff that we saw around us. But when you step onstage it’s a very artificial situation to begin with. To pretend it’s not—that isn’t being authentic.” Annie Clark told me, “I came up with a Gen X ethos that was very much, like, ‘If you are crying onstage, or performing, or doing anything other than wearing the street clothes that you wore all day, you’re a poser.’ Especially in indie music, there’s a premium on authenticity. Of course, that particular authenticity was a guise like any other.” She continued, “But what was unlocked for me while working with David was the idea of putting on a show. It’s not that everything has to be choreographed, but bodies in space is a beautiful thing. He’s one of the great dancers and choreographers of our time.” By 1976, Byrne was transforming into an idiosyncratic but magnetic front man, jerky and handsome. He was awkward, but in a determined, outsized way. “I think I might have exaggerated my social discomfort a little bit, for effect,” Byrne said. “I remember being conscious of forming this character, of being quirky and odd, being intentional about that. Which now seems . . . not phony, but, eh, you know.” In the fall of 1975, Seymour Stein, a founder of Sire Records, had been standing outside CBGB on a night when Talking Heads were opening for the Ramones. He was intrigued enough by what he heard to go inside the venue early. “I remember seeing him standing there as if he were a statue, eyes popping out,” Frantz recalled in his memoir. Stein offered the band a deal with Sire the next day. Talking Heads declined. They didn’t even have a manager. “We watched Blondie get signed, the Ramones get signed, Patti Smith get signed. We felt like maybe we shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry,” Byrne said. “One of the reasons we could take our time was that we could play a weekend at CBGB’s, and then maybe another gig somewhere else in town, or in Boston or wherever, and make enough money to pay rent and feed ourselves and all that. We didn’t have to sign to a label right away.” The band received some oddball counsel from elder statesmen of the scene. One afternoon, Andy Warhol invited the group over for lunch. “By then, the Factory was on Union Square—it wasn’t the decadent silver loft in midtown. It was now this kind of business place,” Byrne said. “I recall a conference table, and Andy was there, being his amusing, enigmatic self. And then we were all given boxed lunches from somewhere. We were of course really flattered, and it was very exciting. But I don’t remember anything of consequence happening.” Frantz said that Warhol told him, “Go easy on the vodka or you’re going to lose your figure.” (Warhol later recorded a radio commercial for the group, directing listeners to “buy the new Talking Heads record and tell them Warhol sent you,” though Frantz also remembers Warhol sometimes thinking that the band’s name was Talking Horses.) In late 1975, Talking Heads met with Lou Reed. At the time, Reed was living in an apartment on the Upper East Side, near Bloomingdale’s. According to Frantz, he invited the band over in the middle of the night, and ate an entire quart of Häagen-Dazs while sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor. It appeared as though the spoon that he used might have once cooked heroin. Reed told Byrne that he should never wear short-sleeved shirts, because his forearms were too hairy. “I might not have picked Lou Reed to be someone so aware of my appearance onstage,” Byrne said. The keyboardist and guitarist Jerry Harrison joined the band in 1977, after his previous group, the Modern Lovers, had broken up. (Jonathan Richman, the lead singer, had decided that he wanted to make sweeter, less aggressive music.) Harrison had recently enrolled in architecture school at Harvard. The previous April, Talking Heads had booked a gig at a place in Cambridge called the Club; Harrison went to the show. “I remember thinking they were really interesting, but it didn’t a hundred per cent get across to me,” Harrison recalled. Nonetheless, that summer, he drove to New York to audition. “We went out for Chinese food,” he said. “We started playing at about two in the morning. It just jelled right away. I think a lot of the other keyboard players attempted to show how versatile they were.” He went on, “I listened to what David was doing and what Tina was doing and then did something compatible, rather than being totally contrapuntal.” Talking Heads finally signed with Sire, more than a year after they’d first been offered a deal. The band, now a four-piece, recorded its début album, “77,” the following spring. The single “Psycho Killer” reached No. 92 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song is still, in some ways, the band’s most emblematic tune: lyrically incomprehensible, rhythmically invigorating, full of menace but still inviting, groovy, exultant. “Some of our influences, people picked up on right away,” Byrne said. “Obviously, we were enamored with Bowie, the Velvet Underground, Iggy. But that was only half our record collection. The other half was Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Three Degrees, Hamilton Bohannon, the O’Jays. Dance music.” In subsequent years, the influence of Afrobeat—an expansive term for music that combines West African polyrhythms, particularly from Nigeria and Ghana, with elements of jazz and funk—became increasingly palpable in Byrne’s writing. In 2018, the Beninese musician Angélique Kidjo released a track-by-track remake of “Remain in Light,” Talking Heads’ fourth album, from 1980. When I interviewed her that year, Kidjo told me that she was drawn to the record in part because, when she heard the single “Once in a Lifetime” at a party, she presumed it was by African musicians. “That music brought me back home, without me understanding what the Talking Heads were about,” she said. Byrne said that he never worried too much about potential accusations of cultural appropriation. (Incidentally, “Remain in Light” preceded Paul Simon’s “Graceland” by six years.) “I didn’t think about it all that much, because we weren’t directly copying anything,” Byrne said. “There was an obvious influence, and I made that clear.” When “Remain in Light” was released, he provided critics with a short bibliography, including books on Haitian voodoo and African musical idioms. “People thought it was very pretentious at the time,” he recalled, laughing. “But it encouraged people to challenge us with those kinds of questions.” One day, I asked Byrne if, when the band was starting out, he would have known what to say if someone had asked him what type of music he played—or, actually, if he knew how to answer that question now. He thought about it for a moment. “No,” he finally said. “I don’t know how to answer it.” Over a prerecorded beat, Byrne launches into “Psycho Killer.” In a review of the film in this magazine, Pauline Kael described Byrne as having a “withdrawn, disembodied, sci-fi quality,” adding, “He’s an idea man, an aesthetician who works in the modernist mode of scary, catatonic irony.” (To be clear, she loved the film, which she called “close to perfection.”) “Stop Making Sense” is extraordinary on its surface, but if you rewatch it enough you’ll start noticing spontaneous flashes of unmediated humanity that, collectively, do something nutritive for the soul—the moment, say, about four minutes into “Girlfriend Is Better,” when Byrne holds the microphone out to a gaffer clutching a light, who leans forward and very calmly says the words “Stop making sense,” or, about three minutes into “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” when the rhythm guitarist Alex Weir whips around to look at the keyboardist Bernie Worrell and Worrell, who is not in focus, does this glorious little snaky dance, a flawless expression of pleasure. For me, “Stop Making Sense”—possibly the entire nineteen-eighties—peaks with the band’s performance of “Burning Down the House.” By then, Byrne has been joined onstage by the rest of Talking Heads, as well as Weir, Worrell, the percussionist Steve Scales, and the vocalists Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt. At the start of the second verse, Scales turns to the camera and sticks out his tongue. “Strange but not a stranger / I’m an ordinary guy!” Byrne shouts. Watching it, I suddenly feel as though I could lift a small car. Demme lingers on Weir, who is clearly having the time of his life; there’s a moment, not long before the end of the song, when Byrne and Weir start dancing together, running in place, kicking their knees up, and then they exchange the sort of look—pure rapture, a kind of impeccable joy—that I’ve only ever seen on the faces of small children when a beloved parent returns home and throws open the front door. For “Girlfriend Is Better,” Byrne puts on the enormous suit that makes his head appear tiny. Even now, forty-one years later, the look is striking. In a “self-interview” that accompanied the film, Byrne said that he liked the proportions of the suit because “music is very physical, and often the body understands it before the head,” and that he liked the phrase “Stop making sense” because it’s “good advice.” There is, of course, a strong current of senselessness running through the film. During “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” the band’s most sparsely arranged song, and also its most tender, Byrne dances with a floor lamp. “That’s a love song made up almost completely of non sequiturs, phrases that may have a strong emotional resonance but don’t have any narrative qualities,” Byrne once said of its lyrics. That might be true in some technical way. Or it’s possible that love itself doesn’t have any narrative qualities. Cumulatively, the language adds up to something: Hi yo, I got plenty of time Hi yo, you got light in your eyes And you’re standing here beside me I love the passing of time Never for money, always for love Cover up and say goodnight. “This Must Be the Place” is uneasy, both musically and lyrically. It’s heavy with yearning, though it also sounds as if Byrne might be lamenting his inability to comprehend or control love. There’s resignation in his vocal: “I feel numb, born with a weak heart / I guess I must be having fun.” That precise sensation—a vague disquietude, a vexation—is central to the band’s distinctiveness. Harrison referred to it as a feeling of “danger,” and attributed it to Byrne. “He would do things that just were totally unexpected,” Harrison said. “And that was part of the excitement. Even though we were the straightest, most buttoned-up group, because of David there was a sense of ‘I don’t know what to expect.’ ” Talking Heads broke up, acrimoniously, in 1991. Byrne had launched a solo career a decade earlier with “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” a strange and thrilling experimental record he made with Eno. That year, Frantz and Weymouth had also started their own band, Tom Tom Club, and scored a hit with “Genius of Love,” a song that went on to be sampled relentlessly, by everyone from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (“It’s Nasty”) to Mariah Carey (“Fantasy”). Byrne gets a little glazed-over when speaking about Talking Heads’ dissolution. He has been pestered about it for more than thirty years; it’s hard to find an interview in which he is not asked, yet again, if the band will reunite. (It isn’t likely.) Mostly, he chalks the ending up to his inability, at the time, to gracefully cede creative control: “My impulse was to micromanage everything, especially all the creative stuff.” There is some irony, then, to Byrne’s post-Talking Heads career, which is marked not just by collaboration but by a staggering amount of it (and with a diverse lineup of artists, including Fatboy Slim, Caetano Veloso, Dirty Projectors, Selena, Oneohtrix Point Never, Philip Glass, Rufus Wainwright, Robyn, and Miley Cyrus). Through the years, Frantz and Weymouth have expressed frustration with Byrne. (Weymouth once described him as “Trumpian,” which she later clarified to mean “transactional” and “very insecure.”) The band played its final full concert in 1984. “After the last show, which happened to be in New Zealand, David told our manager that he would no longer perform onstage with Talking Heads,” Frantz said. “He did not attend the end-of-tour party that night. To say that there was frustration and hurt is putting it mildly.” Still, Talking Heads did go on to release three more studio albums, an arrangement that worked in part because Frantz, Weymouth, and Harrison were pursuing other projects and starting families. The band’s official end was even less ceremonious. One day, Byrne, who was becoming increasingly focussed on his solo work, told the Los Angeles Times, “You could say broken up, or call it whatever you like.” His comment was startling to the rest of the band. “David’s departure was disappointing, not the least because we had to learn of it from a newspaper,” Weymouth told me. Harrison is a little more magnanimous about the breakup, partly because his experience in the Modern Lovers prepared him for intra-band tumult. (“When I went into the Talking Heads, I was thinking, Bands have a lifetime, they are not forever,” he said.) Still, he called the decision to split “idiotic.” He speculated that, for Frantz and Weymouth, it probably felt especially bitter. “Tom Tom Club was even more successful than Talking Heads when that first album came out. ‘Genius of Love’ was as huge a song as you can imagine,” he said. “They did not nourish that with the intensity needed to keep it viable, because their first love was Talking Heads.” Harrison also said that, in 1985, the band had been approached about performing at Live Aid, but that Byrne wasn’t interested. “We would have been great,” Harrison said. “David didn’t want to be bothered with it. We could have been the biggest band in the world if we did that. I, once again, thought it was stupid.” In 1996, Frantz, Weymouth, and Harrison, as the Heads, released a record called “No Talking, Just Head,” featuring a series of guest vocalists. Byrne sued the group, claiming that the name was a trademark violation. (The case was settled out of court; the trio did not make another record together.) “I tried to have a good relationship with everyone,” Harrison said. “That was a very awkward moment, because, A, I was now lumped together with Chris and Tina, whereas up until this point I felt like I had my independent relationship with David, and, B, I thought it was unfair of him to be suing us. It codified that we really don’t get along, and it was unnecessary.” Talking Heads did play together again, in 2002, when the group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It was a three-song medley: “Life During Wartime,” “Psycho Killer,” and “Burning Down the House.” I mean—it sounded awesome. Buoyant, alive. The band briefly reconnected (in conversation, at least) to promote a reissue of “Stop Making Sense,” first appearing on a panel, moderated by Spike Lee, at the Toronto International Film Festival. The conversation was gracious and thoughtful, if not particularly revelatory. “We’ve had cordial moments” is how Harrison described it. Weymouth said, “For Chris and me, there is no looking back.” One morning, at his office, Byrne and I were discussing the economics of reunion tours. He told me that most of the offers he’d fielded were underwhelming, once you did the math. But the bigger issue was that he believed such an effort would be regressive. “Have you seen any reunion tours where you felt, like, ‘Oh, they’ve really evolved and they’re bringing something new to the table, and this is the next step they would have taken’?” he said. He’s right—with a handful of exceptions (Oasis, the Stooges featuring Mike Watt), those sorts of outings tend to be bleak. I suppose the impulse to raise the dead shouldn’t always be so easily indulged. Or, as Byrne yelps on “Life During Wartime,” a song about navigating apocalypse, “No time for dancing, or lovey dovey / I ain’t got time for that now.” The show featured the comedians Ramy Youssef and Reggie Watts, the ventriloquist Nina Conti, the magician Steve Cuiffo, the beatboxer Kaila Mullady, the burlesque artist Julie Atlas Muz, the Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass band, and Annie and the Caldwells, a fiery disco-soul group from Mississippi, signed to Luaka Bop, Byrne’s record label. Between performances, participants in the Free to Be Youth Project (which provides legal counsel to young L.G.B.T.Q. people) and Rocking the Boat (a group in the Bronx that teaches kids and teens how to build and row wooden boats) spoke about their organizations. At the end, Byrne came onstage to play “Slippery People,” and led the crowd in an exuberant sing-along. “Love from the bottom to the top,” we hollered. Byrne and Gaonkar stopped by the after-party, shook some hands, laughed, drank rosé from plastic cups. Byrne considers “American Utopia,” the Broadway show that he launched in 2019, based on a solo album of the same name, to be part of the broader Reasons to Be Cheerful cosmos. “The journalism project and the show were a kind of counterforce to what I saw happening in the country,” he said. “I thought, Oh, maybe we can show rather than tell that there are encouraging things going on—or we can be that encouraging thing.” It’s a jukebox musical of a sort, punctuated by moments of Byrne in soliloquy, urging people to see and support one another, and also to vote. (A review in the Times called Byrne “an avuncular, off-center shepherd,” and compared him to Mr. Rogers.) The central themes of “American Utopia” are affirmation and connection. The show also features Byrne questioning once again why people are the way they are. At one point, before singing “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” Byrne jokingly (and randomly) divides the audience into people who met “on apps” and people who didn’t. Then he says, “Objectively, I could never figure out why looking at a person should be any more interesting than looking at any other thing, like, say, a bicycle or a beautiful sunset or a nice bag of potato chips. But, yeah, looking at people—that’s the best.” Yet Byrne has always had an unusual interest in the inanimate. His gospel of connection is expansive: love one another, love the world. The most recent era of Byrne’s life has been dedicated to perpetuating ideas of hopefulness and service. He has come to understand this as a kind of mandate. “The days of just providing entertainment, they’re over—we have an obligation to do more,” he said in a conversation with Spike Lee. It’s an interesting shift. At the start of Byrne’s career, his approach was less didactic, and his stance was more confrontational. For Talking Heads fans, it’s easy to resist this type of softening—to decry it, yet again, as inauthentic—but it also feels to me like a truthful, maybe even aspirational way to age. Perhaps the longer we hang around, the more we simply want to somehow be of use. These days, Byrne keeps busy. He often arrives at meetings with a tablet, and takes copious notes. When I told him that he seemed unusually organized for a rock star, he laughed. “My brain only has the capacity for a certain amount of things,” he said. “We like to think when we’re sitting in a meeting and talking we’re gonna remember it all. Well, you’re not gonna remember it all!” (“After working with David, I became a person who showed up to the start of rehearsals with a binder and a pencil,” Annie Clark said.) This past summer, Byrne was concurrently planning his wedding, the “Who Is the Sky?” album launch, and a sixty-eight-date world tour, which kicked off in Pittsburgh in mid-September. In August, I attended a rehearsal. Byrne, his band, and his dancers were wearing coördinating bright-orange sneakers (on the road, everyone would alternate between orange and periwinkle blue, each paired with a matching suitlike ensemble by Veronica Leoni for Calvin Klein) and running through some songs with the choreographer Steven Hoggett, who, on that afternoon, had them marching in concentric circles. Byrne tends to favor movement that’s kinetic but a little crooked—the sorts of blunt gestures that, theoretically, anyone can do. When I spoke to him on the phone a few dates into the tour, he was still working out some details. “We’re shifting things to keep the momentum going,” he said. “The audience got up and started dancing at one point, and then I started talking, and they all sat down. You just don’t know until you put it in front of people. So we make a note, and we react. In a sense, the audience becomes our collaborator that way.” One morning before he left for the tour, Byrne and I met at Pace Gallery, in Chelsea, to review proofs of a collection of large-format photographs that he was preparing to show there later in the year. “I rarely, rarely take pictures of people,” he said. “I take pictures of things that people have made, evidence of what humans have done.” That might include a bizarre storefront display (one of the photos in the running that day featured mannequins in sundresses, with boom boxes as heads), or a road sign totally obscured by stickers, or a pile of laundry in an inexplicably compelling arrangement. Sometimes Byrne’s assistant posts the photos to Instagram. “That’s the only thing I do on Instagram,” he said. “In fact, I’ve never looked at it. I think I might be terrified.” Byrne’s interest in photographing man-made jetsam feels aligned with his point of view—the way his lyrics often resemble narrative experiments more than romantic confessions. “It’s Duchamp’s idea that the everyday, looked at through a different lens, can be incredibly artistic,” Harrison said of Byrne’s style. “He’s going to talk about the structure, the house, the building, the staircase, you know, rather than the way the light casts itself through the window.” Byrne has been making visual art for a long time, but he remains grateful for the emotional range that music enables—how it allows for the synchronous expression of diametric feelings. “Lyrically, you can talk about something kind of depressing, but it can be buoyed by beats and sounds. It works together—one balances out the other. I don’t know where else we can do that,” he said. “In writing or film, you can cut from one thing to another. But simultaneously? No.” In early September, Byrne released a music video for “What Is the Reason for It?” It was directed by Dustin Yellin, an artist and the founder of Pioneer Works, a nonprofit performance-and-gallery space in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Yellin took twenty or so of Byrne’s line drawings (several of the same figures are also painted in the stairwells at the Pace Gallery) and used A.I. to awaken them: they danced, they sang, they melted, they blinked, they pawed at an iPhone screen. When Yellin showed a rough cut to Byrne, in Brooklyn, Byrne clapped. “Very nice!” he said, smiling. Yellin and Byrne had run into each other just a month before, at a benefit for the A.C.L.U. “I said to him, ‘Have you ever thought about using A.I. to bring your drawings to life?’ ” Yellin recalled. Byrne said, “I came out here and took a few drawings, mainly this spiky man, and said, ‘Let’s see what it does.’ ” “His fucking face when he first saw his drawings moving,” Yellin said. “You’re looking at your art, and then all of a sudden it’s alive.” Byrne has an appropriate amount of trepidation about the intersection of A.I. and music (“It’s frightening when you’re asking it to create songs out of whole cloth,” he said), but in his own way he has been animating the inanimate for years, enlivening and romanticizing objects, structures, whatever—finding meaning in entities that other people might dismiss as inert or unimportant. Occasionally, he even sees himself in things, as on “(Nothing but) Flowers,” a track from “Naked,” the final Talking Heads album: Years ago I was an angry young man And I’d pretend That I was a billboard Standing tall By the side of the road I fell in love With a beautiful highway. The lyrics are about dissociation and distance (the song describes the narrator’s fear of a landscape scraped of modernity, reclaimed by nature), but they are also about connection—hope in a damaged place, love where we least expect it. ♦
