David Byrne Still Not Interested In Talking Heads Reunion

David Byrne was the subject of The Rolling Stone Interview. The influential musician talked his new album, Who Is The Sky?, as well as the recent rekindling of his relationship with his Talking Heads bandmates around the reissue of their landmark concert film, Stop Making Sense. Byrne, however, didn’t see a full reunion on the horizon.

The conversation began with Byrne talking about how he came across the title for his new record, Who Is The Sky.

“Somebody was sending me a text using voice-to-text, and the algorithm got it a little bit wrong. And what came up on my phone was ‘Who is the sky?’ And I thought, ‘That’s a beautiful phrase.’ I know what they were really saying — it’s pretty easy to tell, in English anyway. But I thought, ‘I’m going to put that on the list of album titles.’ And I realized that it fit in other ways. There’s a lot of songs where I’m asking, ‘Who am I? Who is this? What is that about? Why do we do this?’ I also had this thought that the image on the record cover would be me partly hidden. So: ‘Who is this guy?'”

The discussion also touched on living in New York City in the 1970s, with Byrne talking about the cold water flat he and his Talking Heads bandmates lived in. The influential musician, who recently collaborated with Olivia Rodrigo and Hayley Williams, also spoke about artists he looked up to when he was young such as The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and Brian Eno.

But on the subject of a Talking Heads reunion, Byrne was steadfast in his conviction that it would not work and that he was in a different place musically.

“I didn’t feel like, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s go out on tour again.’ Or, ‘Let’s make another record.’ Musically, I’ve gone to a very different place. And I also felt like there’s been a fair number of reunion records and tours. And some of them were probably pretty good. Not very many. It’s pretty much impossible to recapture where you were at that time in your life. For an audience … that was formative music for them at a particular time. They might persuade themselves that they can relive that, but you can’t.”

Byrne added: “[Y]ou realize you can’t turn the clock back. When you hear music at a certain point in your life, it means a lot. But it doesn’t mean you can go back there and make it happen again.”

Watch The Rolling Stone Interview with David Byrne below:

David Byrne continues his extensive world tour supporting Who Is The Sky? tonight with his first of two consecutive shows in Austin, Texas. View a full list of dates by scrolling below.