David Byrne On New LP ‘Who Is the Sky?’ and Love for Olivia Rodrigo

Yesterday, David Byrne revealed on Instagram Stories that he will marry his fiancee Mala Gaonkor in a matter of days. (In true eccentric Byrne style, the announcement appeared beneath a photo of lettuce.) The nuptials arrive on the same week that he drops his new album, Who Is the Sky?. With its kaleidoscopic cover and irresistible tunes, the latest release from the king of avant-garde pop keeps the party going. Fans will be able to feel the buzz in person when Byrne’s highly anticipated new tour kicks off at the Dolby Theatre in November.

For Byrne, an apostle of euphoria, all this giddiness seems fitting. Back in his Talking Head-fronting days, the euphoria was the jittery kind. In 2018’s American Utopia tour, which later found lasting success on Broadway, it grew warmer and more communal. It’s not blind bliss that he’s selling, but, as he explains to The Hollywood Reporter, a celebration of the oddness of life. Says Byrne of the new record, “I think of it as a love song to humanity.”

Hi, David. I may have seen you riding by on a bicycle in Manhattan once or twice, which you’re known to do.

I was on my bike yesterday, and I’ll be on one later today. It’s kind of how I get around. And yesterday was the Gay Pride parade. If I didn’t have a bike, I would have been really stuck.

Congratulations on an incredible run for you over the last five or so years. It was a delight to see you light up Broadway with American Utopia. And now you have this new album and a supporting tour. Can you tell me a bit about the inspiration for this new work?

I was doing American Utopia on Broadway, which was interrupted by COVID. I didn’t write anything during COVID. I did a lot of drawings, but I didn’t write anything. As we started coming out of that I started writing stuff, a lot of songs. It was mainly the words, though, and a lot of them came out as little stories. I’d start with a title or the first couple of lines. My fiancée often reminds me to moisturize, and one evening I started to imagine: “What if it really, really works? What if I woke up looking a lot younger? What would that be like?” So I invented a whole scenario and that became the song “Moisturizer Thing.”

I did that with a few different songs where I’d start with a premise and just see where it went. Often it turned into a little parable, where there was actually something serious to say at the end. But you might have to get through some pretty silly or fantastic stuff to get there.

You had some new collaborators on this album. Who are they?

As these songs were coming into being, I would just do really simple demos for myself. I heard a record by this group called The Ghost Train Orchestra. It’s a small orchestra, like 15 people, based here in New York. And I liked the sound of it. It was a mixture of a guitar, bass, drums, that kind of stuff and basic orchestral instruments, some winds, brass and string players. And I thought, “That’s a nice sound. That’s a nice combination. What if these songs that I’m doing kind of sounded like that?” So I surreptitiously managed to meet them by offering to sing the Rufus Wainwright parts at a concert they were doing in Brooklyn.

I was still thinking about how the record might sound, and I had some records, vinyl and streaming that had been produced by a guy named Kid Harpoon. I was introduced to him at a birthday party in Santa Monica. He seemed very nice. So I sent him all my demos and said, “These are the kind of songs I write. They are what they are. I would love to work with you.” That’s how the elements came together.

How exciting for Ghost Train to get a call from David Byrne. I’m reminded of David Bowie finding a jazz quartet for Blackstar at a little New York City jazz club. It has to be such an amazing moment for them.

Well, we’ll see. Yes, I hope they get some recognition and their attention. They’re really inventive with their arrangements as players, so I hope that happens.

Let’s talk about the catchy first single “Everybody Laughs” and its ingenious music video.

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo did the video. I’d seen kind of an art piece that he’d done in Times Square. He did this wonderful video installation piece that featured people “looking” out at the pedestrians in Times Square. And I loved that idea. We couldn’t do it in Times Square. That is some expensive real estate there.

You were talking about writing little allegories. It’s a light song, but with some heavy implications.

That’s the way a lot of the songs are. They can be amusing, but then there’s an undercurrent. They have something else to say besides just being humorous.

And where is your head at lately? We have wars; we have a divided nation. There’s some serious stuff going on in the world.

There are days or hours when I’m filled with anxiety and worry for the nation and worry for what’s going on in the world. And then there’s times when I realize wringing my hands about all that is not going to make it better. I have to put out kind of a counterforce to that or an antidote. I have to push back on all the fear and anger and everything that’s suspicion and hatred. We’re not just mean-spirited people who hate one another. I try to appeal to that side of ourselves and that side to my own self as well. It’s a kind of therapeutic healing thing, I guess, writing these songs and singing them.

To me, that’s what “Everybody Laughs” is about. You’re trying to show us our common humanity. And it’s very moving in that sense to me.

I think of it as a kind of love song to humanity, not to a person.

You’re as much a visual artist as you are a musical artist, and I love this image you’ve come up with for the album cover. You look like a giant Koosh ball.

What’s a Koosh ball?

It’s like a rubber toy. Rosie O’Donnell used to slingshot them on her talk show, but they’re basically like these rubber toys with little rubber hair.

There are spikes and things sticking out?

Yeah. They’re very colorful. But you’ve created an entire outfit and look like a human Koosh ball on the album cover. I love it. How did you come up with that?

I reached out to a graphic designer that I’d worked with before, a woman named Shira Inbar. I liked her work and said, “Do you want to work with me on this record cover?” I had a book of Mexican masks. These are not elaborate, artisanal, folkloric masks. These are masks made by ordinary people that a friend of mine photographs and they would just take household items and assemble it. They look kind of fantastic. And I said, “I’d like the feeling that [my costume] was just invented by grabbing whatever was around, kind of household bits and pieces and rummaging through drawers and making something up on the spot.” She had seen this artist Tom Van Der Borght. He’s a Belgian. He calls himself a fashion designer and she saw his fashion show at Berlin Fashion Week.

So we reached out to him and said, “Could you adapt one of these things you’ve made? And I’ll wear it, but we want to see a little bit of my face so that people know it’s me in there.” Yeah. So he shipped a couple of these outfits over and I spent an afternoon putting them on and dancing in them.

Do they vibrate or shake?

Yeah. The spiky parts are made of zip ties, and then there’s like bungee cords in there, and there’s plastic tubes that you might get on Canal Street and all this kind of stuff, all kind of fastened together like a net or something with the zip ties sticking out. It’s pretty heavy. It weighs between 40 and 50 pounds.

You showed up onstage with Olivia Rodrigo not too long ago. I love that she appreciates great indie rock and that you’re open to performing with a newer talent like that.

I knew some of her songs. I went to see her show when she was at Madison Square Garden in 2024. I thought it was really good. Her songs are funny, but kind of moving at the same time. She was obviously having a great time. And so when she and her folks reached out to me and said, “Do you want to do a song together?,” I immediately said yes. I thought “this will be great.” I like her sensibility, her songs. I said “can we do some choreography? Can we do some movement? Do we have time to work something out.” And we did.

The internet certainly ate it up.

Yeah, it sure did.