As a solo artist, he's the King of Semi-Pop. Recall the anecdote in Byrne's book How Music Works, in which an immediately post-Heads Byrne, embarking on his first solo tour, puts together a large, skilled Latin band to play songs from his first non-soundtrack solo album, Rei Momo, then finds himself slotted on a festival bill between Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, having missed the memo regarding grunge's authenticity-fetishism renaissance. Byrne has spent those 30 years carving a second-act arc that feels impressively NEVER FOR MONEY–ish, zigzagging in pursuit of interests that only very occasionally line up with where the rest of pop music is headed at any given moment. The final Talking Heads album, Naked, came out 30 years ago. “I didn't do it,” David Byrne says, as if to discourage anyone from drawing conclusions.ĭraw a conclusion anyway.
Here is a dollar bill, on which someone has written the Talking Heads lyric NEVER FOR MONEY, ALWAYS FOR LOVE in what looks like red pen. If you need to see his Oscar, it's on a shelf near the floor, near a bowling trophy. Byrne thanked two people-Bertolucci and the movie's producer, Jeremy Thomas-then said, “This is a lot of fun, but it's more fun doin' it.” End speech. He won that one for The Last Emperor, too. “There's an Oscar around here somewhere,” Byrne says with a grin.
Byrne got it in 1988 for his contribution to the score of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. Note how everyone who works for David Byrne is the hippest person you've ever met. Enjoy a cup of coffee fetched by a Todomundo staffer with a Jean-Seberg-as-Joan-of-Arc haircut, a woman so hip she's never heard a podcast. Their houses are in motion.ĭavid Byrne will be in the back, wrapping up a call. The little people in the painting are floating up to heaven. The Finster in Byrne's foyer depicts a Day of Judgment–type situation in which earth loses its gravity. The first thing you see when you get off on the correct floor is a painting by Howard Finster, the outsider artist and Baptist preacher whose illustration of Byrne as an Atlas in tighty-whities adorned the cover of the Talking Heads album Little Creatures. If the door slides open and the staff of a boiler-roomish telephone-sales operation turn away from a corkboard hung with printouts about cruise-ship-vacation packages to stare balefully at you like body snatchers about to unhinge their jaws and shriek, go back down-you're on the wrong floor. The elevator that leads up to Todomundo-David Byrne’s Manhattan studio, which is hidden in a drab building on lower Broadway, just up from Canal Street-can be tetchy.
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