![]() There’s a lot that ends up being put on the shelf.” “Although in case people have the impression that everything I do, I should say that not everything succeeds. “It’s very pleasurable for me to be at work on something,” he says, smiling. Byrne concedes that he’s a bit of a workaholic and is rarely happy without a project on the go. In 2012, he wrote How Music Works, which looked at the nature of music and live performance, and how it is shaped by time, place, technology, architecture and human relationships. In fact, Reasons to Be Cheerful is one of many extracurricular activities for Byrne in a career that, along with albums, has taken in film soundtracks, photography, drawing, DVDs and books. But then you discover there are positive, encouraging things happening in one region, one county or one little town and you go, ‘Well look, they’re solving that problem.’” When I wake up in the morning and read the papers, I need a bit of an antidote. Byrne’s plan was to spread some good cheer, he says, “but also this is therapy for me. In 2018, Byrne launched Reasons to Be Cheerful, an online magazine concentrating solely on stories that reflect positive change in the world, from the Brazilian city that has defined access to food as a human right to the Norwegian scientific team that helped to ship seed banks out of Syria before the bombs hit. When you see the coronavirus exploding across the United States, and how many dead there are, and how many people just don’t care about that or think it’s a conspiracy, you just go, ‘Wow, the country I’m living in isn’t the country I thought it was.’” ![]() What is surprising is how many people still support him. ![]() But then to see this happen… Trump was not a surprise. “We’ve all had our dystopian fantasies of what could go wrong, and there’s plenty of books and TV shows that represent that. I wonder if he’d ever imagined seeing the world, but most of all America, brought so low in the past five years. Today, talking over Zoom from his New York home, Byrne, 68, appears entirely relaxed, reflecting warmly on the show that has breathed new life into his career at a time when he might feasibly have slowed down and taken up gardening. Byrne is a famously nervy interviewee – the first time I met him, in 2003, he picked anxiously at his clothes and didn’t seem to know what to do with his limbs. But if he’s bored of talking about it, he does a great job of hiding it. This means that Byrne, once dubbed rock’s renaissance man by Time magazine, is again on the promotional trail, discussing what has, over the course of two years, become his multiplatform masterpiece. The show, which began life as an album and later moved to Broadway in 2019, has now become a concert film, courtesy of the director Spike Lee. Endlessly inventive and visually spectacular, it was a joy to behold. Instead, the 12-piece band strapped instruments to their bodies and, dressed in matching grey suits, danced barefoot in rigorously choreographed formation along with Byrne, all the while working through a setlist that interspersed songs from his solo career with old Talking Heads hits. ![]() Closer to experimental theatre than live music, his American Utopia tour brought with it a redrawing of the rules of musical performance, introducing audiences to a brave new world without drum risers, cables, visible amps or microphones. In 2018, the writer, performer and former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne blew up the traditional pop concert before our eyes. ![]()
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