‘Who Is the Sky’: The strange way David Byrne arrived at his new album title
To put it simply, David Byrne has a reputation for thinking a little outside the box. The ebullient persona cultivated for the purposes of the Talking Heads enraptured the world through its zany, sometimes disturbing, but always raucous outlook.
Yet behind the mask, Byrne is patently very different—quiet, reserved, unassuming—which makes the dichotomy between himself and his musical output all the more intriguing.
Much has been speculated and discussed about the nuances of Byrne’s psyche through the years, so this is not the place for some theoretical analysis. But what has remained unerringly persistent through everything from the Talking Heads to his solo career and all that landed in between is a blazing energy that, for Byrne, even in all his 73 years, has never lost its spark.
That unwavering sense of vigour has indeed served him well, and continues to do so as he keeps moving forward in his musical journey, most notably with his upcoming album Who is the Sky?, being released in September. In Byrne’s characteristic fashion, without even having heard the record yet, the title alone opens up a whole world of questions, not least what it actually means or what the artistic significance may be.
However, in somewhat of a break from convention for the musician, for once, there’s a pretty straightforward answer. Byrne has made it a point for his latest album to be focused on sonic accessibility, which has never been better summed up than when discussing the inspiration behind the title in a recent video. “You must pronounce it carefully, because it sounds a lot like where it came from, ‘who is this guy?’,” Byrne explained, before going on to offer the frankly mundane context behind his new technicolour world.
“Somebody was reaching out to me using a voice-to-text [software] on their phone, and it garbled it, and it turned what they were saying, which was obviously ‘who is this guy?’ into ‘who is the sky?’, which is what appeared on my phone.”
Much like any artist worth his salt, Byrne realised he could take inspiration from even the unlikeliest places. “I knew what they were trying to say,” he added, “but this was actually more poetic and I [thought] I might like it as a record title”.
Everyone’s come under the wrath of a text typo at one point or another, but where most people would simply shrug it off, it’s the mark of an artist like Byrne to see the unsuspecting beauty in it. Combining the notions of art pop with anthropology and accessibility seems like a pretty tall order on the surface, but if there’s anything that the former Talking Heads frontman has proved before, it’s that he always has a few surprises up his huge sleeves.
Of course, no one yet quite knows what sonic direction Who is the Sky? is due to take, but Byrne likes to keep his fans on their toes that way. Perceived ordinary poeticism in the album title could very well give way to one of Byrne’s most absurdist cacophonies yet, or just be a fun pop record—there’s no way of telling. Yet, come September, when the full force of the album is finally unleashed on the world, we may still not know exactly who the sky is, but we will know Byrne’s much-anticipated next steps.
