UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: All right. How are you, David?
DAVID BYRNE: Hi. Hi. Hi.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Great to see you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
David Byrne was worried that he'd kept us up too late.
BYRNE: Do you normally do interviews this late?
SIMON: Every now and then. I - you know, when we're in, like, the White House Situation Room or something like that.
BYRNE: Oh, OK.
SIMON: That's sometimes what we do.
BYRNE: (Laughter).
SIMON: David Byrne's just wrapped up another night in his busy "Who Is The Sky?" tour. It's a stage presentation of music and performance art where musicians and dancers seem to step and soar within scenes and landscapes of forests and city streets of people, skyscrapers, mountains and protests. The show also has interludes where David Byrne, who's been an influential artist since he was frontman for Talking Heads, starting in the mid-1970s, shares stories about his life and about the world. He met us backstage at Chicago's Auditorium Theatre.
What a wonderful show. There's...
BYRNE: I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm glad you came.
SIMON: There's so much joy in this show.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: Do you feel we need it now?
BYRNE: I certainly do. Other people who have seen it - they've said the same thing. They said, we need this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) Everybody laughs and everybody cries. Everybody lives and everybody does. Everybody eats and everybody loves. Everybody knows what everybody does. Everybody's going through the changes, every complication.
SIMON: Is it fun to be back in front of people?
BYRNE: It's been a few years, but yeah. I've gotten more comfortable with it, and...
SIMON: Excuse me. You've gotten more comfortable with it?
BYRNE: More comfortable than when I first started.
SIMON: Oh.
BYRNE: Then it was more a compulsion.
SIMON: I see.
BYRNE: It was a way of asserting my identity or whatever. And now it's more considered. I get more enjoyment, just pure enjoyment out of it. And I realize I can play with the form of what a music concert can be. That's a lot of fun.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) Everybody wonders what you're going to do. Everything is closer. Еverything is true. Everybody's starting еverything again. Everybody's outside. Now they're coming in. Everybody's...
SIMON: Tell us about the stagecraft in the show. It's amazing. There's scenes of New York. There's scenes of a forest. There's scenes of the seashore...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) I welcome you to my house.
SIMON: ...Scenes of your apartment.
BYRNE: You see...
SIMON: Like, furniture. Yes.
BYRNE: You see it in the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) House and a garden. There are plants and trees. Take a closer inspection.
BYRNE: I thought, should I let people see my apartment?
SIMON: Why not?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) Now everybody's coming to my house, and I'm never going to be alone. Yeah, everybody's coming to my house, and they're never going to go back home.
I was inspired by a German dance choreographer, a woman named Pina Bausch. I saw one of her pieces. There was just one scene where there was a projection of, like, a jungle or something like that. And it wasn't that complete, but it kind of - I thought, you could do this, where it looks like the performers are in that environment. I said, let's see if we can use the screens to put us in different environments that somehow resonate with the different songs or with the world that we live in. So I thought, oh, we can put ourselves in a forest. We can put ourselves in a street. We can put ourselves on the moon.
(CHEERING)
SIMON: Well, and I was startled at that moment. You give us a vision of heaven in, like, the first three minutes of the show.
BYRNE: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) Everyone is trying to get to the bar. The name of the bar - the bar is called Heaven.
That particular moment is very moving for me.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) They play my favorite song.
Sometimes it's kind of - I kind of choke up, and it's kind of a little hard to...
SIMON: Yeah.
BYRNE: ...Proceed.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) They play it all night long. Oh, heaven. Heaven is a place...
SIMON: Without giving away the punch line, what you suggest is, don't look into the heavens for heaven.
BYRNE: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of tell the audience, here it is. Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) There is a party. Everyone is there. Everyone will leave at exactly the same time.
SIMON: May I ask you about autism?
BYRNE: Sure. I just felt that's the way I am. That's the way I see and understand the world, and - didn't feel bad. I didn't feel sad about it or anything like that. And then sort of positive things, like being able to intensely focus on...
SIMON: Yeah.
BYRNE: ...A project or writing a song or whatever it might be.
SIMON: I wonder if it isn't - in some ways, hasn't been a real creative spur for you.
BYRNE: I think quite a number of the songs I write even now have what's been described as, like, an anthropologist from Mars quality of trying to understand human behavior in some way. And that kind of goes along with that as well. That's kind of useful. I mean, it can be a little bit profound and a little bit funny at the same time.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: Your music has always been different. You can't say, oh, it belongs to this. It belongs to that. It's always been you.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) I can't seem to face up to the facts. I'm tense and nervous, and I can't relax. Can't sleep. Bed's on fire. Don't touch me. I'm a real live wire. Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est?
I'm old enough to have - the first kind of pop music I heard was in the mid- and late '60s and the early '70s. And it seemed like there was this approval that musicians and songwriters were allowed to experiment and try all different sorts of things. That was even encouraged, even to the point where it was kind of expected.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) Oh. (Vocalizing) ooh.
So I thought, oh, this is what this life is about - constantly experimenting, trying different things, seeing what works, what doesn't work. You're not supposed to just repeat yourself over and over again. I assume that's the job description.
SIMON: It's a very joyful show, but you do have some distressing images that are thrown up on the stage. Recent images.
BYRNE: Yeah. I have an old song called "Life During Wartime."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons, packed up and ready to go. Heard of some grave sites out by the highway, place where nobody knows.
Depicts a - kind of a world that's descended into kind of - urban kind of guerrilla warfare, in a sense. And it's written kind of from the point of view of the protagonists or whatever. And some of it seems to be very resonant and kind of relevant to things that are happening today.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) No time for dancing or lovey-dovey.
I thought - at the very end of the song, I throw up a lot of images of ICE raids and people being beaten.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (SInging) I got three passports. I got a couple of visas. Don't even know my real name. High on a hillside, the trucks are loading. Everything's ready to roll.
SIMON: Why was it important to you to do that?
BYRNE: I don't want to kind of completely depress people. But I want to say, oh no, we're entertaining you, but there are things going on in the world. And we're aware of that, and we're not going to pretend that that's not happening.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) Now.
SIMON: Are you saying something, or are you asking people to reflect and reach their own conclusion?
BYRNE: If I can possibly do it, I don't want to tell people, do this. Be like this, or - the whole theatrical thing is show, don't tell. Let them see what's possible rather than telling them what's possible.
SIMON: What goes through your mind these days when you sing, same as it ever was - the phrase - over and over?
BYRNE: (Laughter) "Once In A Lifetime," same as it ever was.
SIMON: Yeah.
BYRNE: This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful life.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack. You may find yourself...
To me, it's a song about trying to understand, you know, the world, the world you live in. Very mundane stuff - your wife, your house, your car, whatever. Do I know this stuff? Do I belong here? Do I understand it? And then the chorus is about...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) Letting the days go by.
UNIDENTIFIED CHORUS: (Singing) Let the water hold me down.
BYRNE: ...The water and letting days go by. It's - the choruses, to me, are more about this kind of joyful surrender, the contrast with the questioning and the puzzling in the verses.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: How do I work this? You may ask yourself, well, where is that large automobile?
Just kind of asking questions. And then the answer seems to be a kind of transcendence and surrender.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) Letting the days go by.
UNIDENTIFIED CHORUS: (Singing) Let the water hold me down.
BYRNE: (Singing) Letting the days go by.
UNIDENTIFIED CHORUS: (Singing) Water flowing underground.
BYRNE: (Singing) Into the blue again.
UNIDENTIFIED CHORUS: (Singing) After the...
SIMON: I found it, to hear it tonight, very comforting. It's the ripple, not the wave that's happening.
BYRNE: Yeah.
SIMON: It's the small strokes.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
And if you can describe those things, the big stuff kind of takes care of itself, in a way.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: Same as it ever was.
The world in a grain of sand or whatever. You can kind of describe a small situation, and everyone recognizes that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: Water dissolving, and water removing. And there is water at the bottom of the ocean. Remove the water. Carry the water.
SIMON: David Byrne, thank you so much.
BYRNE: Thank you.
SIMON: Great to be with you.
BYRNE: Thank you. Thanks for coming.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BYRNE: (Singing) The ocean. Letting the days go by.
UNIDENTIFIED CHORUS: (Singing) Let the water hold me down.
BYRNE: (Singing) Letting the days go by.
UNIDENTIFIED CHORUS: (Singing) Water flowing underground.
BYRNE: (Singing) Into the blue again.
UNIDENTIFIED CHORUS: (Singing) Into the silent water.
BYRNE: (Singing) Under the rocks and stones.
UNIDENTIFIED CHORUS: (Singing) There is... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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