David Byrne‘s new LP Who Is The Sky? arrives in slightly over three weeks, and he’s just shared new single “The Avant Garde.”
“Some people will hear this and say, ‘David is calling bullshit on his friends’ but it’s more nuanced than that,” Byrne said in a statement. “Anyone who knows me knows that I go to plenty of shows that might be classified as avant-garde or experimental. Edgy and untraditional work is hugely inspiring to me, as it often changes the way I think and influences what I do (without me simply appropriating the ideas, I hope). That said, trying something unproven and radically new is risky. Sometimes, as with anything risky, it doesn’t quite hit the bullseye. There’s no guarantee that it will achieve what it aims to do, but when it does, the emotional and intellectual rewards are worth it.”
In a brand new Rolling Stone Interview with Deputy Music Editor Simon Vozick-Levinson, Byrne said he called the album Who Is The Sky? because of a mangled voice-to-text message that meant to ask “who is this guy?” “The algorithm got it a little bit wrong,” he said. “And what came up on my phone was ‘Who is the sky?’ And I thought, ‘That’s a beautiful phrase.’ I know what they were really saying — it’s pretty easy to tell, in English anyway. But I thought, ‘I’m going to put that on the list of album titles.’”
The Who Is The Sky? tour kicks off Sept. 30 at Radio City Music Hall. It’s an epic run that’ll keep Byrne busy through March. As always, he’s likely to play plenty of old Talking Heads songs in addition to selections from his recent solo albums. “I can mix and match and have it adapt to the sound that I’m doing at the moment without completely destroying the integrity of the older songs,” he said. “But I’m also aware that there’s a real trap. If you do too much of the older material, you become a legacy act that comes out and plays the old hits. You cash in really quick, but then you’ve dug yourself a hole.”
The Rolling Stone Interview dates back to the earliest days of the magazine when Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Jerry Garcia, and many other iconic artists sat down for extensive, career-spanning conversations. Over the past few months, the franchise has been revitalized. Recent Rolling Stone Interview subjects include Eric Church, James Gunn, Charlamagne Tha God, Stephen A. Smith, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
For a deep dive through history, head to the Rolling Stone Interview Archive. It begins with Eric Clapton and Cass Elliott in 1968, and stretches all the way through the present.
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