David Byrne Live In New York Review: A joyous celebration

Talking Heads’ leader continues to push the performance envelope with spectacular hometown show.

@Rich Fury/MSG Entertainment

David Byrne

Radio City Music Hall, New York, Tuesday, September 30, 2025

“Love and kindness,” announces David Byrne, midway through the first of four appearances at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, “are the most punk thing you can do right now.”

It’s a summation not just of his current tour’s theme, but also of the evolution of Byrne’s career. Introduced to the world as an uptight, paranoid nerd, as the world has gotten more brutal, he has become an avuncular guru, a relentless optimist, from the heavy dose of whimsy on his new album, Who Is the Sky? to his nonprofit newsletter Reasons To Be Cheerful to the spirit of the new shows.

Fifty years after moving to New York City and starting Talking Heads, fifty blocks uptown from CBGB, 73-year-old Byrne—recently engaged and maybe recently married—remains a quintessential New Yorker. But while he was once known as a rock intellectual, an avant-garde populist (which he spoofs on a new song called, simply, The Avant-Garde), Byrne’s intentions have shifted, committing to calm and creativity at this most volatile moment—and on this night, reinforces yet again that he has long been one of our greatest live performers.

For this writer, the jury is still out on Who Is the Sky?, which sounds great but can feel a little goofy. But over the years, we’ve often seen new Byrne music come more fully alive when he brings it to the stage. Tonight, Everybody Laughs and What Is the Reason for It? from the album hold their own in a set filled with beloved Talking Heads bangers (though going back-to-back with newbies I Met The Buddha At A Downtown Party and My Apartment Is My Friend feels like a bit much).

The staging of the 13 musicians, singers, and dancers builds on the breakthrough of the American Utopia tour and Broadway show, which untethered the players from fixed positions and allowed them to roam the stage. Where …Utopia relied entirely on lighting, though, this time there are massive, high-def projections, as the band “floats up above the Earth” in And She Was, or we witness the “discount store turn into a cornfield” in Nothing But Flowers.

The work of choreographer Steven Hoggett is quietly remarkable. The constant movement is loose-limbed, child-like; it feels made up, until you remember that with that many people on a stage, if everyone doesn’t know exactly where the others are, disaster is imminent. At unexpected moments, little dance parties or drum circles break out, and there’s lots of light touches and hands on shoulders—a constant sense of connection.

The bulk of the material, of course, comes from the Talking Heads catalog, but the generous spirit of latter-day Byrne shapes its treatment, too. More tender songs like Heaven or the divine This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody) easily fit with his positive outlook, while more intense songs are given gentler treatments; the apocalyptic gospel of Slippery People is a lighter celebration of the groove.

Even the most celebrated Heads songs, drenched in fear and tension, take on new meanings. Byrne is playing Psycho Killer for the first time in almost twenty years, in a band arrangement by the late composer Arthur Russell, but it feels less interior, more like a character study, with a hint of empathy.

Once In A Lifetime will never miss, but its terror—“My God, what have I done?”—is replaced with a sense of wonder. Right at the moment you start to think that Fear Of Music’s Life During Wartime has gone too soft, though, Byrne smacks us in the face with a barrage of news footage from immigration rallies, police conflicts, and battle zones, and the all-too-real-in-2025 lyrics snap into focus.

This progression was the “story” of Stop Making Sense, right? Byrne began that show in 1983 as an anxious loner, who over the course of the evening finds and builds a community around him until the exultant release of the final songs. Writ large, this has become the narrative–and focus–of Byrne’s expansive career.

“No matter how messed up, confusing, cynical this world is,” he says to open the encore, “as people we love being together.” That leads into a glorious version of American Utopia’s Everybody’s Coming To My House, with a vocal arrangement borrowed from an adaptation by a gospel choir. Byrne closes it all out with his greatest pure celebration, Burning Down The House. Not a note needed to change on that one—a final statement, a joyful noise.