For the better part of a decade, David Byrne was the front-man of Talking Heads. To celebrate the revival of Jonathan Demme’s concert film, Stop Making Sense, we’re revisiting our special talk with the legendary musician himself.
At the top, we discuss how Byrne processed the pandemic in New York City (6:45), finding creativity in unlikely places (9:50), the evolution of his Broadway show ‘American Utopia’ (10:47), the influence of poet William Blake (13:00), his gift for collaboration (16:36), and the power of the song, Glass Concrete & Stone (20:54).
On the back-half, he opens up about his pivot from New Wave to Latin music (23:40), getting comfortable with creating on his own terms (30:35), and why he turned to performance as a response to being neurodivergent (36:32). He also reflects on his relationship to the Talking Heads (41:30), the cross generational impact of his art (44:15), the unique interpretations of American Utopia (46:30), and how he “found the world” through making music (50:25).
Purchase tickets to see Stop Making Sense in theaters here.
Pushkin. This is talk Easy.
I'm student Forgoso. Welcome to the show.
Today we return to our conversation with artist and musician David Byrne. For the better part of a decade, Burne was, of course, the frontman of Talking Heads, a ragtag collection of former art school students that found each other in the New York punk scene of the nineteen seventies. Together they would become pioneers of the new wave movement, producing hit songs like burning Down the House, Road to Nowhere Once in a Lifetime and this must be the Place. But at the height of the band's success, something remarkable happened. In December of nineteen eighty three. For three nights at the Pantagious Theater in Los Angeles, the group performed a kind of retrospective of their work, and all of it, lucky for us, was captured on film. The result was Stopped Making Sense, directed by the late great Jonathan Demi, and to celebrate the film's fortieth anniversary, the good people at A twenty four have recently restored it in four K and are putting it back in theaters starting this week. If you haven't seen it in a bit or just want to hear some talking heads. Here's a clip from the trailer.
Same as it was said.
Us time is it after us time is holding us times days?
I anybody can have any questions.
That was from the film Stop Making Sense. It's currently available in Imax for one week before expanding the theaters across the country on September twenty ninth. If you'd like to check out the new four K restoration, which is really just so stunning, you can get tickets at Stop Making Sense Dot Movie. That's Stop Making Sense Dot Movie. You can also find that link in the description of this episode wherever you are listening right now. As for today, I sat with David in New York City last March around the tail end of his Broadway production of American Utopia. We talked a whole lot about that show at the beginning and end of this episode, but we also talk about his gift for collaboration, how he's moved so seamlessly out of mediums and genres throughout his career, and of course, his complicated relationship with the talking heads. That's all coming up next with the One and Only David Byrne. Stay with Us, David Byrne, Hi Hi pleasure to meet you.
Thank you, Thank you.
We're sitting in New York, and I was thinking about how I hadn't done one of these in person in a little bit. Now. It's a strange sensation sitting with a stranger you and I have never met before. How do you feel about it, sitting across from a stranger on microphones.
Well, I've kind of had my fellow zooms. I think in person meetings and discussions are just a lot more fruitful. We read other people in lots of different ways that aren't communicated by phones or texts or zooms, so a lot more gets done.
I had a similar sensation that I'm having now this past week when I went to see her show on Broadway, American Utopia. I was in a room full of strangers, and I wanted to start here because in the opening of your show you mentioned first performing Utopia in twenty nineteen. In the intervening years, you said, how I see the world has changed, And I figure, we just begin in the present. What are you thinking about when you say that, What has shifted for you since March of twenty twenty.
I don't think I'm unique, but I think we've all become aware of how connected we are within wow, really just months, it decimates the whole globe and it spreads everywhere, and we're not out of it quite yet. In this whatever globalized world, we can't say, oh, we'll just keep this isolated. So yeah, that changed. I saw. I've seen simultaneously during the pandemic, the rise of kind of a lot of civic awareness, people marching and talking about kind of social justice issues that we're always there. People became more vocal and vocal about it. And then at the same time this counter trend of misinformation and just complete falsehoods and lying and all this kind of stuff completely what would be called antisocial behavior. I guess as if I can have my own truth, it doesn't have to do with anything that relates to reality. Whatever I say is true is true. It's like individualism cranked up to some incredible extreme.
Those are the global changes that I think you and I have both seen. I think other people have seen those as well. When you said that on stage, it did feel like you were also talking about some things that have shifted inside of you.
Yes, like a lot of other New Yorkers.
By the way, it's perfect as you're talking about New Yorkers. We hear a siren in the background.
Yes, we are in New York.
They won't let us forget it.
As with a lot of other New Yorkers. Yes, we kind of were in lockdown for a long time, varying levels of lockdown, but so a lot of us spent a lot of time alone, whether it was doing zoom calls or watching streaming movies, but just being by yourself. I think I was pretty much okay with that. I mean, I wouldn't want to go on forever. I did miss seeing people, but I'm a person who is kind of okay just being by myself. Sometimes. I don't mind going out to a restaurant by myself, sitting at the counter and reading a book. I don't mind that. I don't feel like, oh, poor lonely guy doesn't have anybody to go out with. I feel like, no, this is what I feel like doing tonight. So that part didn't make me kind of lose my mind. But I think for some people who really rely on their sense of self being affirmed or denied or whatever by other people, that kind of isolation was really hard on a lot of people.
Are you someone that's particularly creative in that isolation. I know you had some trouble writing songs, which is where this book comes in a history of the world in Dingbats.
I tried to write some songs during the depths of the pandemic. I wrote one that was kind of funny about being attracted to someone but all you could see was their eyes and you couldn't get any closer than six feet. But I thought, you can try and find humor in this. But for a lot of people, this is very serious. They don't have work, people are getting sick and dying. It's not a joke. I kind of put that and said, let's see what happens. And what happened was I started drawing on a lot of my feelings about the pandemic and the lockdown, and everything came out that way. That wasn't intentional. But after I'd done a kind of a pile off and I looked at it and thought, oh, I see what's going on here. I'm starting to work on songs now. At that point I couldn't figure out I was too close to it. I couldn't figure out how to respond to this.
You started performing your show before the pandemic and twenty nine. It was initially just a record which was released in twenty eighteen, and it seemed to be in response to the Trump presidency. Here's a quote from you the way Trump says, let's make America great again, imagining some more perfect, ideal version of America in the past. I think many of us imagine there's an ideal version of what a country could be or what life could be that exists, maybe not in a concrete future, but in a conceptual future of some sort. Now that we're in twenty twenty two, living in a different version of America, at least to some degree, where are you placing the show these days?
The kind of the bones of the show started coming together even before the Trump was elected president. Although it might seem that way, it was not really a response to him being president. Although that's when a lot of the show got put up and started running in It's certainly when it ended up on Broadway. Then it seemed like all the issues that we bring up in the show seemed to be things that were very kind of of the moment, but they've been kind of brewing for a while before that. When we returned to Broadway in twenty twenty one, the show had a slightly different feel. How so it felt a little bit more celebratory in the last year or so, whereas when we were doing it in twenty nineteen it felt like it was a response to the kind of the anxiety I think that a lot of us were feeling about the state of the world, the state of the country, our own state of mind. So it was cathartic in that way. But now it seemed like the audience being together, they felt like we're kind of getting through this, and so there was a feeling of a celebrating being together, be a crowd of people being together, which hadn't happened in a long time. All those kinds of things.
That mission statement in which people being together just signed by sign actually feels hopeful. There's something in that about longing for something better. I think that's a through line throughout the show, and it seems like it's in part informed by the William Blake poem called Jerusalem. It would later be turned into in English hymn, but it was first published in preface to Milton a poem from eighteen ten. Would you mind reading it for us?
You have it there? Of course you do? And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green, and was the holy Lamb of God on England's pleasant pasture scene, And did the countenance Divine shine forth upon our clouded hills, and was Jerusalem builded there amongst these dark satanic mills. Bring me my bow of burning gold, Bring me my arrows of desire, Bring me my spear, oh cloud's unfold, Bring me my chariot of fire. I will not cease from mental fight, nor shial my sword sleep in my hand till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land. That's a poem of longing too and delonging in hope the world that might be longed for, that can be approached.
When you're reading that and thinking about it in relation to American utopia, what do you think that world looks like?
Wow? What does it look like? Rather than kind of coming up with a big utopian manifesto, I tend to go for little things, little by little. I have an online news magazine called Reasons to Be Cheerful, and the other day working on an article about places that are turning back jerrymandering, and a group of people in Michigan managed to do that. The first step was to get a lot of signatures, get a initiative added to the ballot so people could have an amendment that would allow for redistricting to happen without the involvement of politicians. And they did it. So things like that, imagine, Okay, if they can do it, what if some other states can do it? Until basically you would like to say, what if the whole country could do that piece by piece, piece by piece, because it seems like, well, maybe that's the way it happens. One place has to show that it can be done, and then other places go, oh, that's not just a dream and it's not just a something you imagined, it can actually be achieved, and how did you do that? And maybe we can do that. I get a little bit of hope from seeing that happening here and there and different things that happens to be one that I'm thinking about at the moment. But there's a resistance to it. It's not easy. The people who did that faced legal challenges, and people tried to kind of stop them or thwart them or turn them back, but they managed to do it.
A couple weeks back, I saw with Stacy Abrams, who of course upended the electorate in Georgia. Her key thesis is that she meets people where they are. And I wondered about this in relation to your work. You've collaborated with so many people, but in this show you're collaborating with a bunch of people. Do you feel like part of your work is to meet people where they are?
Well? When you say where they are, I think of that metaphorically that where they are mean like what they're thinking, what they're feeling. You know.
Actually, David, I like to imagine you just riding your bicycle to each of your bandmates' homes.
Well, I almost do that. During the depths of the pandemic here, bandmates and I and sometimes other friends would go for a lot of bike rides and we'd ride all over the place. It was a way of being together with other people, but you were being socially distant, and we took it as an opportunity to explore different neighborhoods in our city that we hadn't seen before.
But spiritually and metaphorically, that idea of meeting your bandmates where they are, is that something you kind of have to do to all work in harmony.
Over the years, I think I've learned a little bit how tompathized with what other people might be going through, my collaborators, bandmates, whatever, trying to see things from their point of view, and sometimes that works. Rather than being confrontational, you can kind of find a place where what is it you want? What is it that I want? What is it that we share together there?
Do you consider yourself a confrontational band leader?
No anymore.
I used to be in a past life.
Yeah, in a past life. I think I used to be a more adamant about my way or the highway, or I'm going to say how everything has to go. And now I realized that not only is that somewhat unpleasant sometimes, but you can sometimes get a better result by including other people in the process. And if they understand it, if you can communicate what it is you're trying to do, they might come up with solutions and ideas that are better than what you yourself would have thought of.
When did that turn happen for you?
Not all at once, little little over like twenty thirty years, kind of a slow process.
Can we talk about the process of actually putting this show together? Because on stage you have a group of untethered musicians, no mic stands, no platforms, no drums. What spoke to you in creating this kind of environment?
Again, it was very incremental. I had done shows before. I did a tour with Saint Vincent where we had a brass section that was completely mobile, which didn't seem that odd because brass sections can be they hold their instruments and we just thought, okay, we put radio mics on them, so they were kind of choreographed, and I wondered, Wow, this kind of you're half awake. And I imagined, what if everyone was untethered like that? What if all the drums were taken apart and you had like a drum line or a somber school or second line that kind of vibe and they're all kind of moving as they're playing. And I thought, that's a really amazing feeling. I witnessed that in those contexts, But what if I could bring that to the stage. And so I thought, Okay, let's see what is technically possible and what's financially possible. I had to see, like, Okay, how many extra musicians am I going to need to do that? Can I afford that? What do I stand to earn from a tour, and what will that pay for? All? This one thing leads to another and you go, okay, we can do that. Now. That means we can have the stage can be empty. But in order to see emptiness you have to sort of draw a line around it. Like the empty space on this desk doesn't look that impressive, but if you kind of drew a line around it and said that place is empty, then it becomes a thing. So I've worked with some technical people and production people and we arrived at the idea of having a curtain kind of made of a lightweight chain. It's just about problem solving. We were thinking for a while about having fabric like curtains and things like that, which might seem natural, but then we were also slated to play outdoor festivals and things, and the wind would have turned those into sales and we would have had to take them all down.
Though. I do kind of comedically like the image of you performing in it just being spread apart.
Oh you mean there's nothing, yeah, and then you.
Have bandmates trying to hold it down together and the time brings all over the place. It could be an experimental art piece.
Yes, it could be. It could be, but it has nothing to do with music. It could be very very dangerous to because it's attached to a metal trust. So we got that figured out and figured we could put the lighting in the same thing that holds the chain, so we didn't have to have visible lighting things, and that was it. Those things started to be worked out about a year before we actually went on tour and started performing. It was a long, long process.
Of all the songs that you play in this show, is there one that you think best displays the talents of the band playing in harmony without any sort of amps, frills, etc.
There's one called Glass, Concrete and Stone, where that a lot of the band members play their instruments by putting their hands and arms through the chain and holding their instrument on the other side so that you don't see them. All you see is their instrument in their hands and arms, which is kind of like, well, we can actually do that.
Well, the fact that you did do that is kind of remarkable to me, So why don't we take a listen to that song? This is Glass Concrete and Stone from the show American Utopia.
It's to make.
It's just.
That was remarkable to see that in person.
Yes, that they're actually able to play that way.
I saw that and I thought, I don't know if I'm ever going to be this talented at anything.
Wow, there's a number of things where people, yeah, moving around all over the place.
Coming back. In American Utopia, we open on you alone, sitting at a desk holding a brain. You slowly then reveal this band all round you, this slow reveal of your collaborators. Did you first conceive of that idea during your two were of the solo record Ray Moomo in nineteen eighty nine.
Yeah, and I've done it before. I showed this film for Stop Making Sense. I started off with just me and an acoustic guitar, and the the others come out little by little. I love the idea of introducing the elements piece by piece that are going to make up the show, and that the audience gets to see little by little what the elements are and how they fit together, and the audience is kind of witnessed to that. So rather than kind of slamming everything out there right away to the audience, kind of introducing it little by little and that let them kind of let the audience kind of figure out Okay, I get this. Now we got this added to that, and now this and this and this and and so they're kind of putting it together in their heads as they see this happening.
In your book how music works around that show, I mentioned on that tour, I bucked the tide. On that tour. We did mostly new material rather than interspersing it with a lot of popul their favorites, and I think I paid the price. While the shows were exciting and even North Americans dance to our music, much of my audience soon abandoned me, assuming I'd gone native, another lesson learned from performing live. At one point we got booked at a European outdoor music festival and my Latin band was sandwich between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Great bands, but I couldn't have felt more out of place.
Yeah, that was the Ramomo tour.
What are you left at?
My kind of single mindedness and wanted to do that. I had a wonderful, wonderful time. It did probably as I wrote there, it did probably alienate some of the kind of core talking heads fans who stuck with me for a while, but then when they saw me come out with a full Latin band. It was like, no, this is not exactly what we signed up for. But to my surprise, the audiences in Latin America really liked it. I thought, okay, well, this is going to be a baptism. They're either going to think I'm a complete phony or that I'm appropriating their music.
But the record was also made with Latin musicians.
Yes, it was made with Latin musicians here in New York mostly, and New York is a place where a lot of this music emerged, a lot of it. There were hybrids of Puerto Rican and Cuban and African and Brazilian music, all kind of emerging out of New York over decades. So it was hard. It wasn't like I was kind of appropriating roots music from different places. This is all New York stuff. This is all stuff that was happening in New York clubs. But for a lot of the audiences in Latin America, my demographic was still kind of the alternative rock crowd, let's say. But they grew up with this music too, and their parents did. So it was almost like this outsider saying, you know, this stuff that you grew up with is pretty great, and you don't have to abandon it.
Well, let's not abandon it here on this show and take a listen to the song Women versus Men from the nineteen eighty nine record Ray Momo.
He said, let's naked.
It's not the law for bitte. It's a treacher reside.
We are must suffer, we.
Are must do. Ude knows how it's started, God knows how land.
The button continues.
Versus that line you have at the top, I bucked the tide on that tour. Have you grown more comfortable with bucking the tide the more you do?
I don't know if I've grown more comfortable bucking the tide, but I've become more aware of when you make a decision to do that, that it's going to cost you. That's what you were laughing about earlier. Yeah, that it's going to cost you. So you shouldn't need to be aware of that. Maybe it won't, but there's a good chance that it will, and so factor that in. Be ready for that.
What do you mean by cost you?
Well, on my costume and audience, my costume. Monetarily, you might find that you have to play in smaller places because fewer people are interested in this new thing that you're trying out that could happen, So you have to kind of figure out, Okay, can I afford to do this?
Are those concerns you have?
Oh?
Yeah, I mean I live in the real world. I'm not going to I ask for a budget to be done on my tours and stuff, and I want to know, Okay, it's not all about money, but I don't want to go home in debt, especially performing doing a concert tour or something like that, doing say a book or a record. Like records these days, you don't make as much money as maybe you used to, so it's not like, Okay, I can do a record and then don't have to support it with a tour or don't have to tour now it's kind of the touring is where your income comes from. With a book, yes, I mean you could write something as I have done from time and time. It could do something fairly already, but I know that that's going to be a limited have a limited audience, and that's okay. I'm not disappointed.
And thinking about the multi culturalism of your work, we were talking about you going to Latin America and conceiving that record with Latin artists a lot of American Utopia is performed, as you say, in the show by immigrants. You said, if you want to talk about immigration, just look on the stage. If immigration was stopped, we wouldn't be here.
Yes, we wouldn't have a show. A lot of these incredibly talented people came from other places, not just to do this show or a little fluid for music. They move around.
I mention all these people, whether it's the Latin artists you work with on that record, the immigrants that occupy the stage of American Utopia you mentioned Annie of Saint Vincent. I mentioned them because so much of your work stems from these feelings of alienation. Early in American Utopia, you say meeting people is hard. Should I go over there and talk to that person? Hell no? And I realize I'm quoting this back to you as you've just met me. But I think one of your great gifts is this ability to collaborate with all those people I just mentioned, whether it's on a song, an exhibit and installation, a book, a Broadway show, whatever it is. And it made me wonder, is making art with people the easiest way for you to connect with people?
Yes, it's a lot easier than having a social conversation or just going up to a stranger at a in or a party or something like that, trying to chat somebody up. I'm a lot more socially comfortable than I used to be. In the show, I'm kind of referring to my older self where I found that profoundly difficult. And I'm not alone there. I realized that. But musical collaboration, you can kind of get outside yourself and do that, and it's kind of like, Okay, that works. That works. We can do that. And being in a band performing all those things, you have to collaborate and work together socially and artistically, and that's maybe a pathway I realized in retrospect, Oh, this is a pathway for me to kind of gradually, step by step navigate kind of social relationships.
What does that mean? When making music? You're stepping outside of yourself.
When you're making music, the decisions you're making with the other people are ideally about what's best for the song, what's best for that piece of music. I mean, not about me personally. They're about the song has an entity, it's a life of its own. The music has that, and you go Okay, the idea is to make that work. It's not to just prompt me up in a way. It almost sounds selfless, well to some extent, but we get plenty of rewards. I think a lot of artists experience this too. If people enjoy the music, they feel like they know me, and they feel like I'm somehow one hundred percent responsible for it, and I feel like, no, I worked on it. This is part of my job. I work on it, and I honor the music and honor the writing and whatever it happens to me. But I feel like I, as a person, I'm not one hundred percent responsible. So there's some disassociation there to some extent. Do you think people know you? Do you believe that I have some friends who I think know me. I think pretty well, but stranger is probably not.
But you think they think they know you?
Yeah? Yeah, you know that. I mean people think that about actors. They've seen an actor and something and they really identify with the part that they play and they feel like they know them. That's their job.
I asked that because I wonder do you ever feel that about people you meet, artists you admire.
I'm as guilty as that as anyone. There are artists whom I admire, whether it's you know, movie directors or songwriters and performers and you know, all sorts, and you go you feel like, oh, that person is expressing the same stuff that I feel. I get what they're doing, I get what they're saying here. But you know, that's just a feeling.
What are you laughing at?
I'm laughing at how I'm as guilty of it as anyone else.
In my head, you were laughing at some past experience where you went up to someone thinking you knew them only through their work.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I've been a fan once or twice two. I was at an event not too long ago, and across the room I saw Henry Lewis Gates, the historian, and he has these documentaries and everything, and I'd like, over the Pandemic. I'd watched everything he'd done, every documentary, every episode, and so I thought, oh, I'm such a fan. I'm going to go introduce myself, and of course I did, and then I realized I have nothing to say. All I could say is I'm such a fan. So I felt kind of stupid, but I thought, okay, that is what you wanted to do, and now I realized that's what people sometimes do to me.
He didn't say like, oh, well, I'm actually a big fan of remaining the light.
No, he didn't. No, he didn't think for him, it was a little bit of a It was not unpleasant, but maybe an interruption.
I'm sure he was pleasantly surprised. Well, we're right back with David Byrne. You mentioned in your book How Music Works that later on in life you diagnosed yourself with some mild dose of Asperger syndrome. And I'm curious this neuro divergence, which is kind of the term most people use. Now. Do you think in some ways it propelled you on to the stage. Oh, absolutely, which I think for some people. Maybe you can explain if that doesn't totally make sense those two things.
Yes, I could see where people would go, wait a minute, you're uncomfortable in social situation, so yet you want to jump up on stage somehow being on stage and performing or whatever. It didn't feel like it was myself. I mean, I realized it is myself, but I felt like it's an artificial situation. You have the framework or structure of a song or a little speech, you're doing or whatever you're doing, and you're not really in a dialogue with people. I realized in retrospect, oh, this becomes a kind of outlet. You might find it difficult to kind of socially interact with people, but being on stage it gives you an opportunity to say, here, I am, I exist. I can express myself in front of you, and then you can retreat back into your shell if you want. Gradually, over the years that kind of changes and you become a more socially adept. Now I think I'm fairly comfortable. But in retrospect, I had a friend who pointed it out at some point when the whole idea of the asper respect FUM was kind of gaining currency, and she said, David, look at this is this you?
How did that interaction go? Well, that's kind of was David, Is this you? She was reading something?
Yeah, well she was looking at something about the spectrum, And I said, yeah, I recognize a lot of that.
Was that the first time you did recognize some of that.
It's the first time maybe I thought I realized that there was a name for it and that it was not uncommon. Maybe like all of us, I didn't see this as a disability. I didn't see it as a superpower either. At the time, it just seemed like this is the way I am. I'm maybe not exactly the same as everybody else.
You didn't see yourself as deficient.
No, I didn't see myself as deficient. I just thought, Okay, I'm a little bit different, and maybe we're all a little bit different from one another. When my friend pointed out, I realized, oh, there's a name for this. When you did receive a name for it, did it at all change how you saw yourself? No, Little by little, I think I was realizing that a lot of what I was doing in my life was either compensating for that, using that to my advantage, or finding ways to interact with people that I felt comfortable with. I started working with a band of four people, and then gradually I had expanded to nine people and even larger bands. And dealing with other people and having to work with them professionally, you realize it's joyous. Once you get on stage and you start playing, it's this joyous experience. It's really cathartic, and you start to emerge.
Little by little, you said there were things that you would do to compensate, What did that look like?
I would feel again comfortable working on my own and still can sometimes find it very easy to focus on something kind of exclude the rest of the world. That's pretty useful when you're doing what I do. I would say, so, I do remember, as I say in the show, trying to figure people out. I couldn't read people automatically or naturally or instinctively. I would sometimes take things people said very literally.
Is it an example here?
Yes, I remember sometimes being abolished and told David that was not meant exactly literally, and gradually learning that sometimes when people say one thing, they assume that you can interpret that when like they say maybe maybe in a certain way that actually means no. They assume that you know that that means no.
You can read between the lines.
Yes, that you can read between the lines in the way they said something, or the way their body language or whatever, And sometimes if you don't, if you're not able to do that, you're kind of left like, hmm, that's not a very clear answer.
So you would take things incredibly literally. Not all the time, but sometimes, yes, have you been trying to figure me out? During this conversation Oh, probably. I assume that you know that that's what we do as people. We constantly on one level we're having a conversation, but at another level we're going, what's this person about? Where did they how do they do this? Their work is to talk to people? Yeah, I mean, I think what you're saying is true. Two people sit down, they're strangers. Of course, we're looking at each other thinking, who the hell is this person? What are they all about? Which, of course I've been trying to figure out during this conversation. Oh okay, you know this literalism that you're talking about. Are not always being able to read between the lines you mentioned earlier this band that you were in called the Talking Heads. In the middle of this conversation, you said that a younger version of yourself was maybe more difficult to work with because of that single mind than this.
So that's a good example of the single mindedness is a good thing because it allows you to focus on something and really try and kind of get it to work and figure out how to do it and to the exclusion of all the other distractions around you. But then as far as dealing with other people, that can be kind of obnoxious and I realized that, Yeah, that there have been times when I've been obnoxious. Hopefully those times are fewer than they were in the past. I mean, you could say, wow, I was a young, younger person. I was unsure of myself, and so I would kind of lash out or act a certain way because of kind of my insecurities or whatever, which we've all seen people do that. Well. We all go through a period when we're younger, sometimes pretending we're more confident than we are. But that sort of gets us through stuff. Fake it till you make it kind of a little bit.
Yeah, there are many people listening that are going to wonder, Sam, you sat with the very talented David Byrne, and you two really didn't talk about this great band that you were in, this great music. And I want to be clear, it's not because I didn't grow up with your music. It's not because I don't love the work you've made. But it seems to me that it's a chapter of your life that you don't particularly like to talk about.
It's not that I don't like to talk about it. I'm proud of what we did, and I like a lot of the work we did. I don't like to dwell on it. That's the thing. I don't like to dwell on it. It's like, well, that's the only thing you did, and everything you've done since then is kind of inconsequential.
That is mind boggling. I don't know anyone who feels that way.
Well, that's nice to hear. There's probably a generation that kind of grew up with that music, talking head stuff, and as with any music that you grew up with, that music had a big impact for people at a certain moment in their life, and nothing you can ever do after that will ever equal that for its impact to them, because it was a particular moment in their life. So it's not about you or your work. It's about how it affected them at their life, which is a great thing and I'm grateful for it, but I also feel like part of it is Yeah, I just don't want to live in the past.
Well, let's stick with the present, because I wasn't alive when those records are made.
M h.
That has no bearing on my enjoyment. I still, you know, was in a college dorm listening talk to the things you made. And I want to go back to your performance this past week when you and the band start playing. Once in a lifetime. In the front row, there's a little girl with her family. She couldn't have been older than four five mm hm, And in the front row as a song begins to play, she was previously sitting on her mother's lap quietly the whole show. This song happens and she erupts. This little girl who has no idea who the hell the talking heads are?
No, she must. I remember that she must have been maybe six.
And yet she had this inherent response, and I wondered what seeing something like that does to you and your spirit.
It was really nice to see yeah, and you feel like, oh, the appeal of this stuff kind of lives on and it's not just geared to a particular generation. Would really nice to see, yes, And it's really great to see her. This little girl was really engaged with the show throughout, and sometimes she would go up in dancing, but other times she would just like watching everything, which is great. There are times, though, when people bring their kids and you can sense like, uh, the father is someone going on, So I want you to come and see this band that means a lot to me, or this artist that means a lot to me. And the kid is just like, oh, for God's sake, do I have to Yes, you do, And the kid is just like not having it. I do not want my parents telling me what I'm supposed to like. I witnessed that too.
I like the image of a disgruntled fourteen year old boy. Oh yeah, unimpressed.
Yes, unimpressed. I'm not going to be impressed, no matter how much I like it, I'm not going to show that I'm impressed. It's a little bit of that going on.
There's clearly a change that's happened in you between that younger Talking Heads front man's self and David Burnett sixty four sixty five. When you sat down with Spike Lee in twenty twenty and Spike for reference directed the film version of American Utopia, you said, there's a character. I mean, it's me, but it's also a character who goes on a journey and ends up in a very different place from where he was in the beginning. It's kind of living inside his head, this American Utopia, and by the end he's engaging with the whole world.
Yeah. I mean, I had to at some point look at the show and realize, what's this show? About I hope that it's not just about me, that I'm kind of the vehicle where people can see that in themselves as well. We all go through that journey in our own way, me and my way, which thankfully gets a laugh every once in a while, but that everybody can identify with a lot of it.
What do you think it's about in twenty twenty two.
It's yeah, as some writers have recently said, it's kind of about connecting with people and learning how to do that little by little, and then kind of actually acting being more engaged.
That transformation I mentioned in that quote, it's kind of living inside his head and by the end he's engaging with the world. There's a clear transformation that happens both in the character that you play but also in you now. And it made me think of the song Everybody's Coming to My House, which in your version is a song about friends coming over and I'm never going to be alone. But in twenty eighteen, the Detroit School of Arts played this song in their way, and I wondered if we could first just listen to your version of this track and then hear how these kids in Detroit played it. Sure, sure, Okay, this is Everybody's Coming to My House by David Byrne.
Imagine molling down the window, image never follow never, I never.
So that was your version of the song Everybody's coming to My House? Now, why don't we take a listen to the kids from the Detroit School of Arts.
I never gonna be.
And I never gonave back.
Everybody, anybody Miles, I'm never gonna be.
We never.
It is such a great job. Yeah, they really transformed the song. It's extraordinary to hear kind of the words that I'm used to singing, but when they sing it, it seems to have a different meaning. Their versions seem to be about welcoming everybody over to their house instead of being having some anxieties about it. And it makes me wonder how much did the song belong to the person who interprets it as opposed to the writer.
That's kind of remarkable. Yeah, that that can happen, That that can happen. Yeah, to have such a clear example of that, I.
Mean, there's probably plenty of songs where it has one meaning and you're never going to bend it into anything else. But there's lots, probably a lot of songs where you can think Oh, given it a different interpretation, you could really find a different meaning in that song. It feels like the work is not limited in what it means or well can be interpreted. It can have a life that goes on beyond you and your interpretation.
My last question for you. In nineteen sixty five, on your transistor radio, tucked away under your pillow, a song emerges, a song that told you, a kid from the suburbs, that there's another world out there, there's things being made for us, and that you had to go and find it. That song was mister tambourine Man by the Birds. When you said with that image a young teenage David Byrne, thinking I have to go out into the world and find something. Do you think you found it?
To some extent, yes, I think so. I found that there were all these communities of musicians and artists and filmmakers, and all these people doing things, people living lives that are different than what I might have thought was possible growing up in the suburbs. And I'm certainly not alone in that thinking, well, I've to go and find out where this is coming. There's another world out there. The song is like a whatever, a little paper airplane message or message in a bottle that was sent out to people like myself and calling us and told us you have to connect with the world that's making this, that we're doing things that will have meaning.
For you, and so you did. David Byrne, thank you for the time, thank you for the music, thank you for this conversation, thank you, thank you.
It's been great to be here.
And that's our show. If you enjoyed that talk with David, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you do your listening. If you want to go above and beyond, you can leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Share the show on social media, share it with the friend. Really, all of it helps new listeners find the show. I want to give a special thanks to the teams at Cranstand Media, Toto Mundo A twenty four and of course our guest David Burn. If you want to check out that new restoration of Stop Making Sense, you can find it exclusively in Imax throughout the week. The film will also expand to theaters across the country starting September twenty nine. To get tickets, visit Stop Making Sense Dot movie that's Stop Making Sense Dot movie. You can also find a link to show times and venues on our website at talk easypod dot com. For more conversations like this one, I'd recommend sd HYAMDB Hines, Lord, Ludvig, Gorenson, Questlove, Lave, and Rlow Parks. You can find all those and more on our website or wherever you are listening to this right now. To hear more Pushkin Podcast, listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at talk Easypod. If you want to purchase one of our mugs they come and Cream or Navy, or our vinyl record with fram Leebowitz, you can do so at talk easypod dot com slash shop. As always, Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Jennison Bravo. Our associate producer is Kitlyn Dryden. Today's talk was edited by Kitlyn Dryden and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our assistant editors are Clarice Gavara, C. J. Mitchell, and Lindsay Ellis. Our illustrations are by Chriscia Chanoy. Our music is by Dylan Peck photographs today are by Emma Meade. Video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gaberzak, Ian Jones and Ethan Senca. I also want to thank our team at Pushkin Industries, Justin Richmond, Julia Barton, John Shnars, Kerrie Brody, David glover headther Feine Air Sandler, Jordan McMillan, Isabella Narvaez, Kira posy, Tera Machado, Maya Cannig, Jason Gambrell, Justine Lang, Lee, Tam Mallad, Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisbern. I'm San Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with writer Zadie Smith. Until then, stay safe and so long.