David Byrne Hits the Zeitgeist in Boston
A dispatch from the Who Is The Sky? Tour at the Boch-Wang Theater
I entered the Boch-Wang Theater, the second of three Boston stops on David Byrne’s Who Is the Sky? Tour, having listened to the new album for which the tour is named, thinking, “Well, this is pretty sunny.”
We do not live in sunny times; the contrast between what I was hearing on my Who Is the Sky? stream and what was surrounding us as a country — heck, the world — was jarring. Much as I’ve liked Byrne’s work over the years going back to the “Psycho Killer”/” Love Goes to Building on Fire” 45 and the subsequent debut LP, Talking Heads ’77, I wasn’t sure I wanted to board the happy train in 2025.
Talk about turnaround.
Nearly two hours after it began, I exited the theater thinking this was one of, if not the best, shows of the year and, yes, it is more of a show than a concert per se, not dissimilar from the American Utopia show. That one began in smaller-scale theaters in 2019 and went large through 2022 (with COVID-19 time off of course) in summer sheds and ultimately, on Broadway. It re-established Byrne, whose career had been more mid-level in his post-Talking Heads days, as a creative and commercial force to be reckoned with all over again.
The tour called Who Is the Sky? is ambitious and expansive, crisscrossing North America through Dec. 6, taking a holiday break and resuming Down Under on Jan. 14. It then hits Europe Feb. 12., wrapping up in Paris March 19.
This show is a multi-leveled, sensory delight: It is music, it is dance, it is a whirlwind of constant movement, all of it set in front of a massive, curved floor-to-ceiling screen where multiple kinds of images — Byrne’s Manhattan apartment, a drone drifting over lush forests, city street scenes, a cascade of red rain and much more. Immersive is an over-used word, but this was completely that. You could effortlessly shift your sights from the stage to screen and back and it was all both dazzling and complementary. It was like the old Sister Sledge song, “Lost in Music.”
There were 13 people on stage, all dressed in loose, two-piece blue suits (the new Blue Man Group?), with the 73-year-old Bryne (mostly) at the center. But he quite consciously positioned himself as a member of the chorus line, too. He interacted with an ever-fluid untethered cast of seven mixed-race and gender musicians (with their instruments attached or strapped) and five dancers-singers. And it wasn’t overtly “sunny.” If American Utopia was about finding joy in the middle of these dark ages, this was a continuation of that theme, and the visuals helped make that idea more concrete, less abstract.
The sound was crystal clear, loud, but not overpowering. The vibe was optimistic and inspiring. While the set drew from Who Is the Sky? (four songs), this was not a Push the New Album tour. The new songs were interspersed with re-arranged classics from the Heads’ glory days, starting with “Heaven” and ending with “Burning Down the House.” (I’ll check in with you momentarily about how powerful “Life During Wartime” was.)
But let’s begin with “Heaven”: It’s the place, we know from the chorus, “where nothing ever happens.” The song began acoustically with Byrne and two string players and the spare starkness of it it made me focus on the clear-sung lyrics more than ever, catching the Warren Zevon tribute — in heaven they play your favorite song and “play it all night long.” And, basically, anything “fun” — a party, a kiss — will be endlessly repeated, numbing the eternal pleasure. At the end, Byrne said, “This is our heaven,” pointing at the image of planet earth behind him on the giant sceen, “the only one we have.”
Next up, “Everybody Laughs,” a somewhat whimsical number — tell me Byrne doesn’t have some Jonathan Richman in him — where Byrne is connecting all of humanity to most routine, personal (and occasionally inspirational) of tasks. See, we’re all the same, underneath it all. The closing message on screen: “Congratulations humanity. We made it!”
I admit I immediately thought, “Well, sure, so far …”
But then it was followed by a peppy “And She Was” — introduced as being inspired by a girl he knew in Baltimore while in high school. He didn’t comprehend how she could be so happy and asked. She said it was because she liked to lay out in a lawn next to a Yoo-hoo factory while tripping on LSD. At that point, the audience knew we were in familiar territory — songs we knew, some with different arrangements and an instrumental focus that was often percussive, polyrhythmic and organic. The synchronous choreography was jaw-dropping; I can hardly imagine how much rehearsal it took to master not just the serpentine dance routines but doing so while carting and playing instruments.
On “T-Shirt,” messages flashed on the screen: “Boston Kicks Ass” (Yes, he drops the proper city in every night) and the one that got the biggest whoop, “Make America Gay Again.”
OK, “Life During Wartime,” a second Talking Heads album song always punctuated (for us old punks) by the verse, “This ain’t no party/This ain’t no disco/This ain’t no fooling around/ This ain’t no Mudd Club or CBGB/Ain’t got time for that now.” Why? Because it’s life during wartime, where Byrne conjures up a dystopian landscape filled with fear and Big Brother-like surveillance. Any of that sound resonant in 2025, four and half decades after conception? Making the present-day song-and-conflict even more acute, as the song accelerated with big metallic, industrial-sounding guitars and synths — the loudest noise of the night — videos of street protests and clashes with ICE goons flashed on the big screen.
More present-day shit: “Like Humans Do” was backed by a video of Italian women singing from their balconies during the COVID lockdown, an act rooted in the traditional Liberation Day festivities when Italians celebrate their release from fascism. Liberated from fascism? Sounds like a pretty good thing, huh? The lines we were left with were about survival, taking it day by day; “I’m breathing in … I’m breathing out.”
“This Is My Apartment” brought us visually into Byrne’s own ascetic well-appointed Manhattan flat (on screen) while he sang about the inanimate space as being as close to you as a friend or lover. Sparked by spending time alone during the pandemic, he sang of how the apartment knew him, unlike others, in all his moods and phases, good, bad and ugly or, as he sang, “the things that no one knows.” It was clever and made a certain sense. If these walls could talk, but as they can’t, the secrets are safe.
More songs about buildings: In “Everybody’s Coming to My House” he’s in a gathering sort of mindset and introduced it by saying “The world can certainly be cynical, cruel and terrifying at times, but as a people, we love being together.”
A central theme of Byrne’s show is a celebration of life and the connectivity to each other that we so desperately need. But just so you know it’s not all happy talk, consider what came back: “Psycho Killer,” signaled by that opening menacing bass line throb. It unfolded as a solitary Byrne stepped out what seemed to be a searchlight on the screen and jumped into the character. (The Heads’ early-career signature song was not played on the American Utopia tour.) Here, as always, Byrne’s nefarious, but not altogether wrong, murderer — I understand where “I hate people when they’re not polite” is coming from — stalks the stage as the band and dancers gather round, showing off, perhaps, the night’s most intricate and elaborate choreography.
It all ended with the celebratory “Burning Down the House,” yes, another song with a building in it. The multi-layered dance party for the smart set came to close. Bows were taken. I walked out of the theater enthralled and uplifted, which I think exactly was the point of it all.
***
Coda, a flashback to 1991: I’m talking with Byrne, whose stock had fallen some. Grunge was ascendent, more decidedly in the alt-rock sweet spot than sharply etched art-rock and funk. He’d broken up the Heads and had gone solo. About that, and not having as big an audience, Byrne said, “It’s a way of saying ‘I’m my own person, I’m of my own identity, I’m not just the singer from a band who’s doing a vanity project.’ You feel like some of the new stuff is better, or at least up to the level of the acclaimed stuff you’ve done in the past, and yet you feel like ‘why isn’t this getting the mass popularity some of the other stuff did?’ Occasionally, it will. Sometimes, the Zeitgeist or moment will hit.”
It’s the fall of 2025 and the Zeitgeist has hit again.
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