David Byrne
David Byrne is an American musician, writer, visual artist, and filmmaker. He was a founding member and the principal songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist of the new wave band Talking Heads.
Byrne was born in Dumbarton, Dunbartonshire, Scotland, and moved to the US with his family as a child. He co-founded Talking Heads in 1975 in New York City. After releasing eight albums, including seven certified gold or platinum, Talking Heads disbanded in 1991.
Byrne has released solo recordings and worked with media including film, photography, opera, fiction, and non-fiction. He has collaborated with artists including Brian Eno, Fatboy Slim, X-Press 2 and St. Vincent. Byrne has received an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, a Special Tony Award, and a Golden Globe Award, and was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of Talking Heads.
Early life and education
David Byrne was born on May 14, 1952, in Dumbarton, Dunbartonshire, Scotland, the elder of two children born to Tom and Emma Byrne. Byrne's mother was Presbyterian and his father Catholic. Two years after his birth, the family moved to Canada, settling in Hamilton, Ontario. The family left Scotland in part because there were few jobs requiring his father's engineering skills and in part because of the tensions in the extended family caused by his parents' interfaith marriage. When Byrne was eight or nine years old they moved to Arbutus, Maryland, in the United States, where his father worked as an electronics engineer at Westinghouse Electric Corporation and his mother later became a teacher. Byrne grew up speaking with a Scottish accent but adopted an American one to fit in at school. He said: "I felt like a bit of an outsider. But then I realized the world was made up of people who were all different. But we're all here."By high school, Byrne knew how to play the guitar, accordion, and violin. He was rejected from his middle school's choir because they said he was "off-key and too withdrawn". From a young age, he had a strong interest in music. His parents say that he would constantly play his phonograph from age three and he learned how to play the harmonica at age five. His father used his electrical engineering skills to modify a reel-to-reel tape recorder so that Byrne could make multitrack recordings.
Byrne graduated from Lansdowne High School in southwest Baltimore County, Maryland. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, during the 1970–71 term and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore during the 1971–72 term before dropping out.
Career
Early career: 1971–1974
Byrne started his musical career in a high school band called Revelation. Between 1971 and 1972, he was one half of a duo named Bizadi with Marc Kehoe. Their repertoire consisted mostly of songs such as "April Showers", "96 Tears", "Dancing on the Ceiling" and Frank Sinatra songs. He returned to Providence in 1973 and formed a band called the Artistics with fellow RISD student Chris Frantz. The band dissolved in 1974. Byrne moved to New York City in May that year, and in September of that year, Frantz and his girlfriend Tina Weymouth followed suit. After Byrne and Frantz were unable to find a bass guitar player in New York for nearly two years, Weymouth learned to play the instrument. While working day jobs in late 1974, they were contemplating a band.Talking Heads: 1975–1991
By January 1975, Talking Heads were practicing and playing together, while still working normal day jobs. They played their first gig in June.In May 1976, Byrne quit his day job, and the three-piece band signed to Sire Records in November of that year. Byrne was the youngest member of the band. Multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison, previously of the Modern Lovers, joined the band in 1977. The band released eight studio albums to acclaim and commercial success. Four albums achieved gold status and two others were certified double-platinum. Talking Heads were pioneers of the new wave music scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s with popular and creative music videos in regular rotation on MTV.
In 1988 the band went on hiatus during which Byrne launched a solo career and the other members pursued their own projects. Talking Heads reunited in 1991 to record the single "Sax and Violins" and officially split in December 1991.
In 2002, Talking Heads was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where they reunited to play four tracks: "Psycho Killer", "Burning Down the House", "Once In A Lifetime" and "Life During Wartime".
Solo album career: 1979–1981, 1989–present
During his time in the band, Byrne took on outside projects, collaborating with Brian Eno during 1979 and 1981 on the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which attracted acclaim for its early use of sampling and found sounds. Following this record, Byrne focused his attention on Talking Heads. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was re-released for its 25th anniversary in early 2006, with new bonus tracks. In keeping with the spirit of the original album, stems for two of the songs' component tracks were released under Creative Commons licenses and a remix contest website was launched.Rei Momo was the second solo album by Byrne, and features mainly Afro-Cuban, Afro-Hispanic, and Brazilian song styles, including popular dances such as merengue, son cubano, samba, mambo, cumbia, cha-cha-chá, bomba and charanga. His third solo album, Uh-Oh, featured a brass section and was driven by tracks such as "Girls on My Mind" and "The Cowboy Mambo ". His fourth solo album, David Byrne, was a more proper rock record, with Byrne playing most of the instruments, leaving percussion for session musicians. "Angels" and "Back in the Box" were the two main singles released from the album. The first one entered the US Modern Rock Tracks chart, reaching No. 24. For his fifth studio effort, the emotional Feelings, Byrne employed a brass orchestra called Black Cat Orchestra. His sixth, Look into the Eyeball, continued the same musical exploration of Feelings, but was compiled of more upbeat tracks, like those found on Uh-Oh.
Grown Backwards, released by Nonesuch Records, used orchestral string arrangements, and includes two operatic arias as well as a rework of X-Press 2 collaboration "Lazy". He also launched a North American and Australian tour with the Tosca Strings. This tour ended with Los Angeles, San Diego and New York shows in August 2005. He also collaborated with Selena on her 1995 album Dreaming of You with "God's Child ".
Byrne and Eno reunited for his eighth album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. He assembled a band to tour worldwide for the album for a six-month period from late 2008 through early 2009 on the Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno Tour.
In 2012, he released a collaborative album with American singer-songwriter St. Vincent called Love This Giant. The album featured both Byrne and St. Vincent on vocals and guitar, backed by a brass section. To promote the album, both artists travelled throughout North America, Europe, and Australia on the Love This Giant Tour in 2012 and 2013, with each performing pieces from their career in the album's distinctive brass band style alongside those composed for the album.
In January 2018, Byrne announced his first solo album in 14 years. American Utopia was released in March through Todo Mundo and Nonesuch Records. He also released the album's first single, "Everybody's Coming to My House", which he co-wrote with Eno. The subsequent tour – which showcased songs from American Utopia alongside highlights from his Talking Heads and solo career to date – was described by NME as being perhaps "the most ambitious and impressive live show of all time", blurring the lines "between gig and theatre, poetry and dance".
In June 2025, Byrne released a new lead single "Everybody Laughs" and announced his next solo album Who Is the Sky?, with all songs being arranged by Ghost Train Orchestra. The album was released the following September via Matador, with the Who Is the Sky? Tour starting the same month. The album also features St. Vincent, Hayley Williams, and Tom Skinner.
Work in theatre, film, and television: 1981–present
In 1981, Byrne partnered with choreographer Twyla Tharp, scoring music he wrote that appeared on his album The Catherine Wheel for a ballet with the same name, prominently featuring unusual rhythms and lyrics. Productions of The Catherine Wheel appeared on Broadway that same year.He was chiefly responsible for the stage design and choreography of the concert film Stop Making Sense.
Byrne wrote the Dirty Dozen Brass Band-inspired score Music for "The Knee Plays", released in 1985, for Robert Wilson's vast five-act opera The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down.
He wrote, directed, and starred in True Stories, a musical collage of discordant Americana for which he also produced most of the film's music. He was impressed by the experimental theatre that he saw in New York City in the 1970s and collaborated with several of its best-known representatives. He worked with Robert Wilson on "The Knee Plays" and "The Forest", and invited Spalding Gray to act in True Stories, while Meredith Monk provided a portion of the film's soundtrack.
Byrne also provided a soundtrack for JoAnne Akalaitis' film Dead End Kids, made after a Mabou Mines theatre production. Byrne's artistic outlook has a great deal in common with the work of these artists. The same year he also added "Loco de Amor" with Celia Cruz to Jonathan Demme's film Something Wild.
His work has been extensively used in film soundtracks, most notably in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su on Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, which won an Academy Award for Best Original Score.
Some of the music from Byrne's orchestral album The Forest was originally used in a Robert Wilson–directed theatre piece titled The Forest. The play premiered at the Theater der Freien Volksbühne, Berlin, in 1988. It received its New York premiere in December 1988 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Forestry Maxi-single contained dance and industrial remixes of pieces from The Forest by Jack Dangers, Rudy Tambala, and Anthony Capel. Byrne released his soundtrack album in 1991.
Byrne also directed the documentary Île Aiye and the concert film of his 1992 Latin-tinged tour titled Between the Teeth.
In Spite of Wishing and Wanting is a soundscape Byrne produced in 1999 for Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus's dance company Ultima Vez.
In 2003, Byrne guest starred as himself on a season 14 episode of The Simpsons. Released the same year, Lead Us Not into Temptation included tracks and musical experiments from his score to film Young Adam.
In late 2005, Byrne and Fatboy Slim began work on Here Lies Love, a disco opera or song cycle about the life of Imelda Marcos, the controversial former First Lady of the Philippines. Some music from this piece was debuted at Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia in February 2006 and the following year at Carnegie Hall on February 3, 2007.
In 2008, Byrne released Big Love: Hymnal – his soundtrack to season two of Big Love, which aired in 2007. These two albums constituted the first releases on his independent record label Todo Mundo. Byrne and Brian Eno provided the soundtrack for the film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
In 2015, he organized Contemporary Color, two arena concerts in Brooklyn and Toronto, for which he brought in ten musical acts who teamed up with ten color guard groups. The concerts were made into a 2016 documentary film, directed by the Ross brothers, and produced by Byrne.
He collaborated with businesswoman Mala Gaonkar in 2016 to co-create Neurosociety, a guided immersive theater performance.
In October 2019, his American Utopia opened at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway. Byrne appeared in comedian John Mulaney's children's musical comedy special John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch, where he performed the song "Pay Attention!" His song "Tiny Apocalypse" was also featured as the special's end credits song.
On February 29, 2020, after a 30-year absence, Byrne performed as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live with John Mulaney as host. Byrne performed "Once in a Lifetime" and "Toe Jam" with the cast of the Broadway show American Utopia and appears in the "Airport Sushi" sketch singing a parody of "Road to Nowhere". This was Byrne's third appearance on Saturday Night Live. He previously served as the musical guest as part of Talking Heads in 1979, and as a solo musical guest in 1989.
In 2022, Byrne again collaborated with Mala Gaonkar on another immersive theater production based on his life, "Theater of the Mind" transforming a 15,000 square-foot warehouse in Denver, Colorado.