The last time I saw David Byrne with a troupe of weightlessly untethered musicians and deceptively simple dancers, they were, en masse, boogalooing down Broadway at the Hudson Theatre for the Talking Heads frontman’s still-fresh American Utopia album. Dressed in matching grey suits and often mimicking each other’s movements, this road-show company did what none of Byrne’s previous solo tours were able to do.
Suddenly, his songs—those from his solo career’s past and those magical anthems from the Talking Heads catalog, from their melodies to their rhythms and on to their plainspoken, refrigerator-magnet poetic lyrics—had transcended their recorded origin story and found unity. Pushed together, the songs—in such puzzle-pieced combinations and nearly-bare staging—grew into immensely rendered and radically prosaic theater music with elementary motion to guide their way. Rather than live anew as a jukebox musical, Byrne’s songs, in this theatrical context, became a tactile road map of American emotion, fear and hope now portrayed narratively with the cushion of velvet seating.
For his Who Is The Sky? tour (which shares a name with his new album with Ghost Train Orchestra), Byrne’s songs of dread and optimism, and the teamwork that makes them swing wholly, all remain the same as American Utopia.
Only now decked out in matching blue janitorial uniforms and steered by the usually message-heavy imagery projected onto the background screens, Byrne’s mix of old and new songs have a socio-conscious heft (even when they don’t) without damnation. It’s hard not to be head-noddingly wow-ed by stage-stretched, hi-def, over-sized projections of slogans like “Make America Gay Again” and “No Kings” (crammed into a makeshift Burger King logo) and action-packed ICE-raid footage where accompanying live songs such as “Slippery People” and “My Apartment Is My Friend” doubly hammer home some hard-pointed rhetoric while wiggling through Steven Hoggett’s limber choreographed movements.
Byrne is much too subtle for that.
Using love and commonality as the bait that motivates his 12-musician/dancer crew (he references John Cameron Mitchell’s “Love and kindness are the most punk things that you can do right now” quote) and their uniform movement as a form of democratic endeavor, Byrne fronts the insistently undulating production with limber, rhythmed steps and a singing voice that’s crisper and warmer than ever before.
That last fun fact was heard best, and heartiest, at the very start of the show with Byrne’s tender-voiced acoustic take on his Heads’ 1979 vintage “Heaven” co-starring a fairly haunting violinist and another string player. From that auspicious introduction, Byrne gave one of his newest songs, “Everybody Laughs,” some much-needed oomph before leaping into a poppy, chiming iteration of Talking Heads’ “And She Was,” then a densely rhythmic, melting arrangement of “Strange Undertones” (from his 2008 duo disc with Brian Eno), then a genuinely diabolical, snaky-soul reading of the Heads’ “Houses In Motion.”
Zig-zagging back-and-forth between new solo music and Talking Heads classics for most of the program, Byrne wrapped up his night at the Met by dipping into his well of tension on “Psycho Killer.” Utilizing the arrangement by late composer/cellist Arthur Russell for the first time in nearly 20 years, Byrne delivered something fresh, empathetic and far less insular than in its previous spiny incarnations. The holy swamp funk of “Once In A Lifetime” sounded more awestruck than it did terrorized with “My God, what have I done?” turned into a glorifying refrain of community, a goal that Byrne doubled-down on by saying, “No matter how messed up, confusing or bad everything may seem at present, as people, we love being together.”
Amen to that.
—A.D. Amorosi; photos by Chris Sikich (shot the night before at the Met)
