- 2 hours ago
On a new episode of The Rolling Stone Interview video podcast, Simon Vozick-Levinson sits down with (a shoe-less) David Byrne in his Soho office. The multi-hyphenate has had a hell of a year: shortly after this interview, Byrne embarked on a 50-date North American tour in support of his excellent album 'Who Is the Sky?' At 73 years old, he’s as full of restless energy as ever, eager to talk about recent onstage collaborations with Olivia Rodrigo, whether or not a Talking Heads reunion is in the cards, and the creative process behind his new music (which he made with Top 40 producer Kid Harpoon).
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00:00I noticed you have, there's like an Oscar that's just there, an Academy Award.
00:04Yeah, yeah. There's lots of other stuff, too.
00:18David Byrne, welcome to The Rolling Stone Interview.
00:21Thank you very much, thank you.
00:22You have an excellent new album.
00:25It's called Who Is The Sky?
00:27And that the title is sort of like originates in a misheard phrase, a misheard lyric, is that right?
00:33Yes.
00:34Somebody was sending me a text using probably voice-to-text, and the algorithm or whatever it is got it a little bit wrong.
00:47And what came up on my phone was, who is the sky?
00:50And I thought, that's a beautiful phrase, but I thought, I'm going to put that on the list of album titles.
00:59And I realized that it sort of fit in other ways.
01:04There's a lot of songs where I'm asking, who am I?
01:08Who is this?
01:09What is that about?
01:09Why do we do this?
01:11Why do we do that?
01:12And I also had this thought that the image on the record cover would be me partly hidden.
01:23So thinking, well, who is this guy?
01:25It might make sense because all you're going to see is a little part of the face.
01:29So it's interesting where you are in such a storied and legendary career to be asking that kind of question or have that question asked, who is this guy?
01:38You know, it's not a debut album.
01:40You'd think at my age I would know who I am, but no, we're always still figuring it out.
01:47Still figuring out who we are and where we belong and how we feel about things.
01:53We'll never really know all the answers.
01:55One of my favorite songs on this album, early on the album, you have a song called My Apartment Is My Friend.
02:02It's a funny title, but it's also kind of like an interesting and almost profound idea, right?
02:06The way that a space can kind of be there for you over time, right?
02:09Were you thinking of a particular apartment when you wrote that?
02:12I was thinking of my apartment where I live now.
02:15I was kind of surprised because during COVID, I tried to write songs and wasn't really able to write much.
02:23I tried to, I wrote words for a song called Six Feet Apart or Six Feet Away about seeing someone, but you can't get in closer than six feet because of social distancing.
02:39And you couldn't see this person's face because of the mask, that kind of thing.
02:44And I sent the words to John Mulaney and said, what do you think?
02:50There was a line about she had Perel in her purse.
02:53He liked that, but I never used it.
02:56I thought, nah, it's, this is, what's happening is kind of, it's serious.
03:02This is not a joke.
03:04There's kind of ambulances parked outside my building.
03:07building, the sirens are going kind of day and night.
03:11I thought, this is not a joke.
03:14But after it all passed, I came up with these words for my apartment is my friend.
03:23Yeah, that's a, that's a fascinating thing to get out of that time.
03:27I mean, that was right in some ways, a kind of intense and harrowing time, you know, in the world here in New York.
03:32But you, you got kind of a song that actually feels kind of positive and, you know, uplifting out of it.
03:37Yeah, I mean, I thought, this is how I felt.
03:39My, the, my apartment is kind of cradling me and holding me and I'm familiar.
03:46I know I'm the only one there.
03:48I'm just wondering what else is visiting.
03:50And so I kind of know where everything is and I know like, okay, I can watch an old movie on streaming at night and I'm going to cook something that I haven't, I haven't tried to cook before, all those kinds of things.
04:08And, uh, I, I don't know how messy it looked, um, you know, there's a big, big temptation for it to just be like, well, it's my mess and nobody's, nobody else is seeing it.
04:23Looking back to then, let's say, what about your, your first apartment in New York when you first moved here years and years ago?
04:29Do you remember what that space was like?
04:30When I first moved here, I kind of slipped on the floor of an artist loft.
04:38There was, the deal was a room and board for helping him fix it up, sand the floors and paint stuff and build a loft bed for him and all that kind of stuff, uh, which was great.
04:49It was like, that was an entry.
04:50And then eventually I moved into a, a loft nearby with two of the talking heads, cold water loft.
05:00In other words, no hot water and no toilet.
05:03There was a toilet shared by the, um, little factories that were in the building and the hallway.
05:10So it was, uh, it was all right.
05:14It was all right.
05:14Um, um, didn't have all the conveniences, um, that one might like.
05:23Yeah, it's interesting.
05:23I mean, that time, you know, New York in the 1970s is endlessly kind of mythologized and it's something people romanticize maybe.
05:29I'm curious, you know, do you think people get that, right?
05:32Yeah, people romanticize the grit and the dirt.
05:35On some level, it was good because the city was kind of on its knees, so it was ignoring a lot of stuff.
05:42People could have, uh, there were like jazz clubs and discos and stuff in, in lofts and stuff in Soho and other places.
05:53And the city just kind of turned a blind eye to all this stuff.
05:59Um, these places were far from legal.
06:01Artists would kind of live in, musicians would live in these lofts or apartments or whatever and pay very low rent.
06:09It's kind of shocking how low the rent was, but that's how funky the neighborhood was.
06:16And that allowed all of us to kind of get a foothold.
06:21I had a part-time pay job and that, but that was enough for me to contribute rent with the band roommates.
06:28So, yeah, you could kind of make your way.
06:33God forbid my parents would have visited, yeah.
06:36Right.
06:37Do you remember when you, when you first moved to New York, you know, in that era, let's say, you know, sleeping on the floor of the artist's loft or later living in a cold water apartment, what you kind of wanted out of life?
06:46What kind of dream you had as a young artist arriving in the city?
06:49When I moved here, my ambition was to be what we call a fine artist, an artist who would show in galleries and things like that.
06:59But the kind of art I was doing, uh, wasn't getting anywhere with it.
07:07I did, it was, some of the things were very conceptual.
07:10I think there was, you know, these, a single line on a kind of a big piece of paper.
07:17But it was in the exact shape of the New Jersey, New Jersey Turnpike.
07:23I thought, you can imagine, yes, a little bit of an uphill climb to get that, get that to go.
07:30But I was really enjoying doing that.
07:33The music stuff, I thought, this is fun, but don't get your hopes up.
07:37There are really great players and musicians out there, great singers.
07:44Don't get your hopes up.
07:46You're going to compete with them.
07:47That you're going to kind of make inroads.
07:50Not because there's people who are a lot better than you are.
07:53But have fun.
08:02Talking about this album, you know, that you've made, coming back to that, it's a great album.
08:06You worked with this producer, Kid Harpoon.
08:08And he's known for making these great pop records with people like Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus.
08:13What made you want to work with someone like that?
08:14I liked the sound of those records that he made.
08:18They're great sounding records.
08:20They have good songs on them.
08:21I know that the stuff I write, the subjects I choose, the kind of songs I write, are not the same as a lot of those records by those artists that you described.
08:35But at the same time, I feel that what I do are still pop records.
08:43They're not meant to be kind of accessible.
08:45They adhere to kind of a pop music structure and sound.
08:52And they have, I hope, choruses that you can sing along with and all those kinds of things, even though the subject matter might be really different.
09:02So I thought, oh, why not?
09:07And, yeah, this guy, Kid Harpoon, kind of, yeah, he said yes.
09:12He said, yeah, let's do it.
09:22You're at a point now where you can make a record like this and it will be rapturously received by the world, right?
09:27People love the music that you make.
09:29You're revered.
09:30Has it always felt that way to you, like people understood what you were doing and people were willing to follow you where you went?
09:36Oh, no.
09:38There was a period, I think it might have been in the early 90s.
09:42I worked with Latin musicians and did a couple of records with those musicians and toured, had a great time.
09:49Pretty well received in Latin America, which was a relief.
09:53But in the United States, as one of the executives at Warner Records said was, David, you are your own Yoko Ono, which is kind of unfair to Yoko.
10:08But I knew what he meant.
10:12Do you remember when it felt like that changed, when it felt like the world kind of caught up to what you were doing?
10:17Well, probably about 10 years ago or so, something like that.
10:22I mean, it's kind of suddenly everything started being like, oh, kind of a younger generation started to be interested in what I was doing.
10:36The kind of the new things I was doing and the various projects that I do and not just so it wasn't just like the people who grew up listening to Talking Heads.
10:50There was a whole nother group that was listening to stuff.
10:53So I think that that changed things a lot.
10:55You know, you mentioned, as you said, obviously there's, I would say at this point, multiple generations of much younger artists who really look up to you and are influenced by you, inspired by the music that you make.
11:05You know, a lot of these artists, they see you kind of as someone they revere, like a hero.
11:09Are you comfortable being an object of kind of hero worship that way?
11:12How does that part feel?
11:13Well, I don't like to think of myself that way, but I mean, if people like what I do, I'm not going to argue with that.
11:25I'm not going to have some kind of psychological issue with it.
11:30But at the same time, you know, for the most part, I'm excited about what I'm doing at the moment, whatever I'm putting together, whether it's a record or a tour or something else.
11:48And I would like to think that maybe that's a big reason why some of these people like what I do, that they see that I have, I've gotten myself into a place where I have a certain amount of freedom to try things out and do different things, which is kind of rare in the music world.
12:10You performed with Olivia Rodrigo earlier this year.
12:18What was that like for you?
12:24How did that come together?
12:25I saw her show at Madison Square Garden months before, and I'm a fan of her music.
12:34Hadn't seen her perform live, but it was good.
12:37It was really good.
12:38She's a great performer and was having a really good time.
12:43You could tell.
12:43Oh, so we got introduced to her afterwards.
12:50She seemed like a real person.
12:52Growing up in the kind of, in the world that she did, and she kind of survived it really well and handled it really well.
13:03Then it was just, out of nowhere comes this invitation, like, hey, would you like to join me on the, yeah, Governance Ball?
13:14When it comes to working with younger artists, do you ever think about, when you were younger, were there ever older artists who you looked up to, like someone who you viewed as kind of like a, you know, an inspiration who you got to work with and had that kind of, the moment they must be having with you now?
13:27Well, one that has been remarked on, we were kind of big fans of the Velvet Underground.
13:33So, members of the band, John Cale and Lou Reed, came to see us and to see other, other groups at CBGB's, at the club we were playing at.
13:47We met with Lou Reed a couple of times.
13:50He wanted to sign us to, like, a management production deal, but it was a little bit too much, like, oh, I don't know if we're ready for this.
13:59We kind of pulled back a little bit.
14:03John introduced us to Brian Eno when we were on our first trip to London, and that proved to be kind of a big deal for us.
14:12All these people were people that we were kind of in awe of.
14:16Since you mentioned Lou Reed, what was Lou Reed like?
14:18I mean, that's like a legendary personality, very unique person.
14:21I remember we were playing through some of our songs, just kind of like strumming a guitar, playing through a song.
14:28I remember he was showing us how if you slowed some of them down a little bit, that might not be the worst thing in the world.
14:35Rather than trying to blurt out all the words really quickly.
14:38So, yeah, he had some good ideas.
14:41I remember we met, he was eating an incredible amount of ice cream.
14:45I think he went through, like, two of those quart containers of Haagen-Dazs ice cream in one sitting, which we were like, wow, okay.
14:59It's interesting.
14:59You're talking about the process of writing these songs as, in some ways, a process of asking questions, right?
15:04Searching for answers, looking for answers.
15:06Do you feel like you reached any conclusions?
15:09I can't think of any.
15:12The more I do this, the more questions there are.
15:18Kind of things open up and you just go, oh, my God.
15:21I thought I was going to get an answer.
15:23And kind of the door opens and just goes, oh, my God.
15:25It's just a whole bunch more questions.
15:28A whole bunch more things that you don't understand.
15:30And you kind of wonder, am I ever going to get any of this figured out?
15:35Maybe not.
15:36Do you think that that's something that's universal or is that something about you, your personality, that you ask those questions and that you're looking for those answers?
15:44I think to some extent it's universal.
15:48Otherwise, people would not connect with anything I've written at all.
15:53If they didn't recognize some of that in themselves, I think they would just be like, oh, this guy's totally off on his own and living in his own world.
16:05I guess I ask because you, you know, talked about feeling like you're different from other people, right?
16:09Feeling like, you know, at times you've talked about feeling like you're on a neurodivergent spectrum, right?
16:15I'm curious about how you think about that now, where you're thinking is of that.
16:17I think very, very little of that remains in me.
16:26But yes, at a certain age, I felt very socially awkward, uncomfortable, but it's a lot less than it used to be.
16:35And some of that, I think, is just age and kind of change over years.
16:44Some of it, I think, is due to music, due to what music can do to you, whether it's somebody else's music or your own.
16:54Some of it is kind of working with other musicians and players and whatever, the other band members, whatever.
17:02I feel like that becomes this very kind of healing social situation.
17:10You're part of a little community that's very supportive, and part of it is kind of the joy of making music.
17:20So I think that's this big thing that kind of pulls me out of it as well.
17:25And I think you're known over the years as someone who collaborates well with other artists and they bring interesting things out of you.
17:30It sounds like that's sort of part of almost like a healing process for you in some ways.
17:33Exactly, yeah. And I mean, collaborating with other people doesn't always work.
17:38When it does, it's really exciting. You end up with something that, whoa, I would have never written that on my own.
17:45And I got to see how this other person works.
17:49You're on tour for this album, and you've said that this is going to be a different kind of show than you've ever done before,
17:54which is, you know, high praise you've done some pretty amazing shows before.
17:57What does that mean? Tell us.
17:58Well, I know I'm going to keep band and dancers and everybody on stage untethered.
18:06We did that for the last tour and the Broadway show.
18:10I'm just, I'm not ready to go back to whatever the drummer is in the back sitting behind a drum kit.
18:18I thought, no, no, it was more fun for the drummers.
18:23And I loved it that everybody was moving around everybody else.
18:29But then I thought, I'm going to add some other elements that put us in different environments.
18:34See if we can sort of tell some kind of story that way.
18:38Story in the very loosest sense.
18:40And, yeah, that's, of course, that's a very different way from how, you know,
18:43some pop stars now will perform with just one person on stage or a person in a DJ,
18:47a person in a very small back and back.
18:48And it sounds like that's not, you know, the way, not something that's super appealing to you.
18:51Yeah, yeah.
18:52I saw that Charlie XCX show and where it was just her on stage, no band, no dancers, nothing else.
18:59I thought, whoa, this is really brave.
19:05But part of me was also going, wow, this is really economical, too.
19:11I thought, I don't know if I'm ready to do that.
19:15Are you a Charlie XCX fan?
19:16And did you have a brand summer last year?
19:18Yeah, yeah.
19:19I was a fan of her, whatever, earlier kind of hyper-pop kind of records.
19:24And I thought, wow, this is very cool stuff.
19:27You mentioned the American Utopia tour and the Broadway show.
19:30It was incredible.
19:31It was a huge success.
19:33You played, I think, hundreds of performances, sometimes more than one a day, right?
19:36And it's a very physical show.
19:38Obviously, you know, it's a Broadway show, but you don't have an understudy.
19:40You've got to be there.
19:42How did you, you know, just stay in shape for that?
19:44What was that like physically?
19:45I did ask myself, how many shows can you do a week?
19:49And Broadway, if you're doing that, you're expected to do eight a week.
19:54You have one day off.
19:55So that means there's two days where you're doing two shows each day.
19:58I thought, I don't know if I'm up to that, because usually in a Broadway show or a musical or whatever like that, the various singers will each sing a couple or a few songs, but they don't sing every song.
20:15And I thought, that's another level of stamina.
20:18So I thought, has anybody done that?
20:22The only person I could come up with was Hugh Jackman.
20:26And I'd met him once, just kind of a social thing.
20:32So I reached out and said, do you think I can do this?
20:39He said, yeah, you can do it.
20:40You can do it.
20:41And, but don't go out partying with your friends after the show, because if you go to a noisy bar and you're shouting and everybody's having a great time, that's like adding another show to your voice.
20:56He also said, if you've got two shows in one day, don't take a nap in between.
21:02You'd be really tempted to go, okay, let me just relax and get ready and think about it.
21:09Don't think about the next one.
21:11And he said, because then you're, you've kind of woken up your body for the first one and you're going to go back down to like zero.
21:19And then you have to kind of get yourself all revved up for the next one.
21:22And he said, no, just kind of stay up there.
21:26Power through the next one.
21:28And that's always been of interest to you, right?
21:30You've always wanted to do a show that's more than just, just a show, you know, just the basic show.
21:34You've always wanted to do something that's more physical, more visual.
21:37Going back to like Stop Making Sense or something like that.
21:39Yes, I realized, oh, we could maybe mess with the whole kind of concert rock show format.
21:49I've been a big fan of kind of downtown theater, kind of more experimental theater or whatever you want to call it, that I'd seen in New York.
22:06And so I realized, oh, there's all sorts of other, other ways you could do this.
22:13Not just add more lights or add more explosions or whatever, but kind of really kind of rethink what it, what it means to perform in front of people.
22:26You know, Stop Making Sense, of course, a couple of years ago now, you re-released.
22:32People were so happy to see that again.
22:34It's such a great, you know, performance, such a great film.
22:37How did it feel for you to kind of revisit that, to see your younger self doing those things?
22:41When A24 was kind of preparing to re-release, Stop Making Sense, I remember going to a screening to see the kind of the new print.
22:53And I hadn't seen it in years.
22:56And it was like me and one other person sitting in the theater.
23:01And I'm watching and I'm thinking, who is that guy?
23:04He's really, he's really serious.
23:07He's very intent on what he's doing.
23:09He's very serious and I feel like telling him, loosen up a little bit.
23:14Take it easy, take it easy.
23:15It's okay.
23:16It's going to be okay.
23:17And by the end of the movie, he kind of does.
23:20But that was, that was my reaction.
23:22I'm kind of looking at myself as if I'm another person.
23:27Right.
23:27When that re-release was in theaters, you, you know, were promoting it on talk shows and film festivals and so on.
23:33You spent more time with your old bandmates and talking heads than you probably had in a long time.
23:36Is that right?
23:37That's true.
23:38Yeah.
23:38What was that like for you to be back with this group of people you had made this music with all those years later?
23:43It was okay.
23:44We're all very proud of that show and the film that Jonathan Demme did.
23:51We're thrilled that people were still interested in it and that audiences still wanted to see it with a new print and new sound mix and that it still seems kind of relevant.
24:02The whole night just seemed like, yes, we're excited about this.
24:07It felt like we put aside whatever differences we have and said, okay, we're not going to go there, but we're going to help promote this thing.
24:18What made it kind of the right time or how did it feel to sort of say, okay, I'll go back, I'll look at that?
24:23You know, it was purely practical and pragmatic.
24:28The contract had run out.
24:31It reverted to us.
24:32We could actually sell it to another distribution company and have it redone and redone right, find the original negative and print it and remix it.
24:44All the things that you'd want to do now became a possibility.
24:49So we just said, yeah, let's do it.
24:52When the four of you appeared at Toronto Film Festival, right, I think that was the first time you had all been on a stage together in something like 20 years, right?
24:59It had been a long time.
25:01Oh, it might have been.
25:02Might have been.
25:03What was it like just, you know, the first time that the four of you met in person to talk about that?
25:07What was it like breaking the ice kind of?
25:10I don't know.
25:11I think we were all just very, we were all just feeling pretty good and feeling pretty excited given we could sense the kind of the way the film was being received and how the audience was receiving it and how excited people were to see this film again, see the document of the show that we'd done.
25:35So we were all pretty good spirits about it.
25:38Because you mentioned, you know, differences and there were times when those relationships were less friendly, right?
25:43There were times when, you know, your bandmates said less than flattering things about you in the press.
25:48I think there was an interview where Tina called you a bully or said that you compared you to Trump and that was like six months or nine months before you were all, you know, on a stage together.
25:56How do you kind of get over that?
25:58You know, you know, I mercifully, I didn't read a lot of that stuff.
26:06Um, I'd hear about it a little bit like you, like you just told me, um, but I didn't read a lot of it and I realized, uh, okay.
26:17Um, I also know that there were periods where, like when we were making Stop Making Sense, where I had this vision of what this show could be.
26:29And I probably wasn't the easiest person in the world to work with because I was kind of very single-minded about, uh, no, the lighting should be like this.
26:39And, uh, we have, the crew has to rehearse, bringing those, wheeling those, uh, risers out so that they're as much a part of the show as the band is.
26:54It all worked, but I think I was not the easiest person to work with in those days.
27:01Now I kind of know how to collaborate a little bit better.
27:05Did you feel like, in all the time that you spent promoting the Stop Making Sense re-release, were the four of you able to get back to, you know, some of the kind of friendship that you once had in the band, you know, in those earliest days?
27:14Oh, yeah.
27:15We felt more comfortable when other, um, I'm just going to anticipate your next questions.
27:21Uh, I didn't feel like, oh, yeah, let's go out on tour again or let's make another record.
27:27I was just, uh, musically, I just, I'd gone to a very different place.
27:34And I also felt like, uh, there's been a fair number of kind of reunion records and tours.
27:43And some of them are probably pretty good.
27:47Not very many, but some of them are pretty good.
27:50And, but it's pretty much impossible to recapture that, where you were at that time in your life musically.
28:01And an audience might, who kind of, that that was kind of formative music for them at a particular time, they might persuade themselves that they can relive that.
28:15But you can't.
28:15And, you know, you could also, you know, you could say to people that if they want to see Talking Heads songs, if they love that music and they want to see those songs, you perform any of those songs in different ways now, right?
28:25You've, you've found ways to integrate that into what you do now.
28:28Yeah, I still do some of those songs.
28:30There's enough of them and enough of my own material that I can kind of mix and match and have it kind of adapt to the sound or arrangements that I'm doing at the moment.
28:42Without kind of completely destroying the integrity of the older songs.
28:49But I'm also aware that there's a real trap.
28:53If you do too much of it, too much of the older material, you become a kind of a legacy act that just comes out and trots, plays the old hits.
29:03You're at a point in your career when some artists would be thinking about doing farewell tours or, you know, talking about retirement.
29:10Is that something you ever think about, sort of how you would wind up your career?
29:14Is that, you know, there's no point in thinking about it?
29:17No, I haven't thought about it.
29:21I've thought about other things.
29:25I've thought about Fred Armisen convinced me to try doing some stand-up.
29:31Which I did unacknowledged.
29:35And it kind of worked.
29:38It kind of worked.
29:40And so I thought, okay, that is one of the scariest professions ever.
29:46Because you're just alone with words for the most part.
29:51David, thank you.
29:52This has been great.
29:55Watch out for the comedy set.
29:57Yeah.
30:01Watch out for the comedy set.
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30:20Watch out for comedy set.
30:21Watch out for comedy set.
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