Talking Heads just celebrated their 50th anniversary as a band with a video for “Psycho Killer” starring Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird, Little Women). After some teasing, David Byrne has announced his new solo album, Who Is The Sky?, released the single “Everybody Laughs” featuring St. Vincent, and will go on a world tour.
Who Is The Sky? was produced by Kid Harpoon, and there’s a whole host of collaborations alongside St. Vincent, including Hayley Williams (who covered Talking Heads’ “Burning Down The House” with Paramore last year; Byrne reciprocated with his take on “Hard Times” for Record Store Day). Elsewhere, Tom Skinner of the Smile, American Utopia drummer Mauro Refosco, and Ghost Train Orchestra, an NYC chamber ensemble that arranged all 12 songs, pop up on the tracklist.
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“Someone I know said, ‘David, you use the word ‘everybody’ a lot.’ I suppose I do that to give an anthropological view of life in New York as we know it,” Byrne says. “Everybody lives, dies, laughs, cries, sleeps, and stares at the ceiling. Everybody’s wearing everybody else’s shoes, which not everybody does, but I have done. I tried to sing about these things that could be seen as negative in a way balanced by an uplifting feeling from the groove and the melody, especially at the end, when St. Vincent and I are doing a lot of hollering and singing together. Music can do that — hold opposites simultaneously.”
“Walking around New York listening to the demo of ‘Everybody Laughs’ was so joyous, because it made me feel like we’re all the same — we all laugh, cry, and sing,” Kid Harpoon adds. “The thing about David that resonates with a lot of people is that he’s in on the joke. He gets the absurdity of it all, and all of these personal observations are his perspective on it.”
See the video for “Everybody Laughs,” directed by Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, below.
David Byrne – Who Is The Sky? tracklist
- “Everybody Laughs”
- “When We Are Singing”
- “My Apartment Is My Friend”
- “A Door Called No”
- “What Is the Reason for It?”
- “I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party”
- “Don’t Be Like That”
- “The Avant Garde”
- “Moisturizing Thing”
- “I’m an Outsider”
- “She Explains Things to Me”
- “The Truth”