David Byrne Challenges the Idea of an Album With Expanded ‘Who Is the Sky?’

By Kory Grow

Kory Grow

Like a good suit, David Byrne has expanded his latest album, Who Is the Sky?, into a digital deluxe edition. He’s also released a psychedelic video for one of the reissue’s four bonus cuts, the upbeat “My Madness.” A man in a colorful, leonine costume weaves yellowish spirals as Byrne sings, “My madness really likes me now,” among horns, acoustic, guitar, and, eventually strings.

In a statement, Byrne ruminated on how the definition of an “album” has expanded from a fixed object to something more malleable in the digital age. “Albums can be super long, super short, and the songs can change over time,” he said. “The only consistent thing might be that the songs were composed and recorded around a similar time — so they speak to that time and place, and have some sort of sonic continuity.

“So here’s my most recent album now expanded with two songs that were cut, not because they weren’t good (I hope) but to give the initial album a nice variety of grooves and subjects,” he continued. “‘My Madness’ — this is one of my personal favorites — the singer imagines their ‘madness’ as a separate entity from themselves, one that they come to love, understand and respect. There’s a reconciliation. There’s an old song, ‘T Shirt,’ that we added to our set list with images of statements folks wear on their T Shirts.”

The expanded edition also includes “What and Where” and “¿Cuál Es La Razón?,” which Byrne describes as “a wonderful reimagining of ‘What Is the Reason for It,’ created by Mexican Institute of Sound and co-written and sung by Natalia Lafoucade.” The original album version featured Hayley Williams.

“Somebody was sending me a text using voice-to-text, and the algorithm got it a little bit wrong,” Byrne recalled while discussing the original album in an interview with Rolling Stone last year. “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.'”

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The expanded release, which marks a year from the release of the original Who Is the Sky? album, also coincides with the end of Byrne’s tour supporting the album. He’ll be playing the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga, New York on Thursday and Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on Saturday. Along the way, The Brutalist filmmaker Brady Corbet shot Byrne’s multi-night stint at Baltimore’s Hippodrome on 70mm film for an upcoming concert picture.

Byrne’s next endeavor is a book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, out Oct. 6. He writes about how many geniuses — “from Bach to Bruegel, Vermeer to Melville,” as the book’s description says — weren’t recognized in their time. His intention with the book is to help people recognize originality when they see it and not to ignore it. He has set a number of tour dates to support the book.

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