Tom Dunne: Sky's the limit for the still-wacky and wonderful David Byrne
David Byrne has a new album, Who Is The Sky. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)
“Has David Byrne lost it?” that is the question. On his new album, he addresses topics like wearing moisturiser, taking advice from his wife and advising Buddha to “stay off the buns”.
Is this really the man who wrote “Psycho Killer qu’est-ce que c’est?.” The short answer is “Bloody sure it is!” followed quickly by, “Trust me, Byrne ain’t losing it.” But this isn’t X. We don’t do short answers.
I have lived my life by the lyrics of David Byrne. At one point, during the Leaving Cert I wore a badge with an image of Byrne on it that said “I am not of this world. I am a white light from God.”
It wasn’t one of his lyrics, but I felt it said all you needed to know about him, and by extension me. Bus conductors were wary of me, and they were right to be.
A few years later, bunking on a couch at a friend’s bedsit on Pearse Street, eyeing the life-threatening mould, the freezing cold, the unwashed plates and the naked bulbs the lyrics of popped into my head.
“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack” said the voice in my mind, “and you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?” It was enough to make me resolve to never leave my parent’s house. I redecorated their box room that very weekend.
I experienced whilst driving on an interstate highway in America on a day when temperatures were hitting 100 degrees fahrenheit. The endless highways, the shimmering heat, Talking Heads on the radio. Byrne was the zeitgeist.
(1980) was the Everest of the era. Byrne was proof positive that there was more intelligence, insight and acuity happening in music than any other art form. It was the gateway drug. As he sang on “I look out the window. I call it education.”
Which brings us to his first album in seven years. You could even describe it as his love album as he announced this week he is soon to marry his partner of nine years standing, Mala Gaonkar. At 73 David is loved up, philosophical, and hilarious.
Mortality is there, and the joy of music — but there after it goes to some strange places. There is a heartfelt paean to his apartment. “You stood by me when darkness came” he sings movingly to its four walls.
I don’t think a pre-civil war, five-storey townhouse with its own enchanting cedar treehouse, 14-foot ceilings and rooftop deck — a rarity in Manhattan and a snip at $17 million- has ever been so lovingly addressed. But it’s on the topic of love that Byrne 2025 really comes into his own.
In an age afflicted by the scourge of mansplaining he is very happy to accept that in his relationship From TV plots to the real meaning of poetry, Mala is his go-to source of all wisdom, and he has never been happier.
In twists that John and Yoko would have envied, he encounters that bars him from entry until “She gave me a kiss, and the door said yes.”
With Paramore’s Hayley Williams he debates the true meaning of Love. “Love is odd, love is queer, love will take you out of here.”
Loved up and confident he feels emboldened to take on Buddha when he meets him at a Downtown party. Spotting the awakened one “stuffing his face like there is no tomorrow” he challenges him directly: “Dude, should you really be eating all that unhealthy stuff? And you being so enlightened don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
A Gen Z-er would end David at this point, but Buddha, being Buddha, is more philosophical. “They think I can help them but I’m not that smart, so here have a piece of this blueberry tart,” says Buddha wisely. Read ‘em and weep, Mr Zimmerman, read ‘em and weep.
His true self is revealed is where he follows Mala’s advice to try a new facial cream. If you think it isn’t the Byrne of old beware. It is. The Psycho Killer is alive and well. Don’t let that radiant, luminous, baby skin fool you.
