Still curious, still playful: David Byrne on music, life and staying human

Creatives around the world have deep and serious concerns about artificial intelligence. But David Byrne has a theory about how to outsmart the system: stay human.

“My sense is that my songs are so peculiar compared to the typical pop song that, and I could be wrong here, but I can’t imagine a machine could come up with the kind of stuff I come up with,” Byrne says.

He could be on to something. Since starting his career with seminal art rock band Talking Heads in the 1970s, the only thing predicable about Byrne’s artistic output is that it has remained creative, boundary pushing, forever surprising and deeply introspective about the beauty and absurdity of the human condition.

Byrne has been at the bleeding edge of musical innovation his entire career, evident early on with Talking Heads’ hit Psycho Killer and his first outing away from the New York icons — his 1981 collaborative album with Brian Eno, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, which pushed the art of sampling music forward.

Now aged 73, he has just released his ninth solo studio album — Who Is The Sky? — and touring it globally. He is in the middle of his North American tour when he jumps on a Zoom call with PLAY ahead of bringing the show to Australia, which will see his first show in Perth since 2009.

The Who Is The Sky tour sees Byrne travel with 13 other musicians and dancers to bring his theatrical-style vision to life. Since his days with Talking Heads Byrne has been known for tweaking the norms of what a rock’n’roll show should look like.

The 1984 Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense is still hugely influential in terms of rock’n’roll stagecraft. His last tour was adapted into a theatre show for Broadway, an experience he says has encouraged him to think differently, yet again, about how to stage a performance.

“For Broadway there was a lot more talking on my part and a concert audience may like a little bit of talking but not too much,” Byrne says. “I became very aware that there is a sense of storytelling. If you can make the show have a through line in some way that makes it a richer experience than just having one song after another.”

“I talk a little bit,” Byrne says of the Who Is The Sky tour.

“Visually there is a fair amount of theatrical stuff going on with the band and dancers and everyone moving round.

“This time, rather than being this neutral, minimal chain that we had last time, I brought in a very large LED screen so that we could be, in effect, in different places. Whether that’s a field or an apartment or a forest. Rather than using those screens to put big images of ourselves, I thought ‘No — lets put ourselves in different places and see if that brings different meaning to the songs’.”

Like all of Byrne’s work, Who Is The Sky? is a glorious fusion of art-school rock and pop music that asks big questions about what it means to be human.

Byrne says he wrote the album during the “tail end of COVID”, and saw him collaborate with New York avant-garde jazz ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra, as well as guest vocalists like St. Vincent’s Annie Clark and Paramore’s Hayley Williams.

“I started writing down lyric ideas and song titles,” he says of how he started penning Who is the Sky?, which came after a songwriting break. “Sometimes the title would kind of lead to the whole story like I Met The Buddha At A Downtown Party. OK, there is a story there. What did he say? What did you say after that? So then that kinda writes itself.”

“How I do it I think has evolved over time,” Byrne says of his songwriting. “There’s a little more storytelling than I’ve done in the past. There’s a few more love songs than there have been in the past. But yes, a lot of it is still me asking questions about, who am I? Who are we? Why do we do these things? What do I do these things? What’s that like? What does it mean? Yes I just keep asking those questions.”

If it sounds all a bit weighty, no fear — Who Is the Sky? is also full of Byrne’s wry humour.

From lyrics like “I met the Buddha at a downtown party/He was hanging by the pastries and the canapes”. To the song Moisturizer Thing: “My love gave me a moisturizing thing/Said, “Hey, David. Put this on your skin/It says it’s anti-aging, antioxidant too/Go ahead and try it. Let’s see what it can do./Woke up the next morning, and what do I see?/I look like a baby, but I am still me/My honey wakes up, she looks over and screams/That lotion is magic, I look like I’m three.”

“I find humour in a lot of things,” Byrne says. “I find that you can say things that are maybe a little bit uncomfortable to people or myself or sometimes even profound but if they are a little bit funny or unexpected it comes across as being less pretentious or less over serious.”

And Talking Heads fans will be pleased to know that alongside his new music, Byrne has revisited many of his early classics in the tour so far.

“I thought ‘Oh, I could reinterpret, rearrange some of those songs’. Keep them recognisable, but I can do that and that’ll be fun. I can find ones that fit. There’s enough material that I can pick things that kind of work thematically with what we’re doing.“

With such a large back catalogue, Byrne will have little difficulty finding songs to fit any theme as he continues to create art that explores what it means to remain human.

David Byrne plays in Perth at RAC Arena on January 27, 2026.