David Byrne: Who is the Sky?

Right from the time he appeared on the global screen, David Byrne was the man who made the normal seem weird.

If not in Talking Heads' music (think about Once in a Lifetime and The Big Country) then certainly in his quirky film True Stories.

Byrne is the everyman out of kilter with the times, viewing it through his own lens and seeing strangeness in the mundane and acceptable.

He's perhaps also the most Self-aware man in popular culture so he might well ask, “who is the sky?”.

Well, he is this guy whose discomforts, droll observations and tinder dry humour propelled Talking Heads into public consciousness then walked his audience through percussive Afro-influenced pop and world music in his solo career.

Here – with the Ghost Train Orchestra's horns and strings – he reverts to immediately familiar, mid-period Talking Heads for quizzical, rhythm-driven pop (Everybody Laughs) and pokes targets close to home: the typically quirky sentiment and sonic circus bleep-pop of My Apartment is My Friend (about exactly that, the familiarity); The Avant Garde aimed at his own brainy and hip constituency: “It's deceptively weighty, profoundly absurd. It's whatever fits, it's the avant garde. And it doesn't mean shit”.

He's newly married but we'd be unwise to literally read the personal in the tongue-in-chic She Explains Things To Me and A Door Called No: “Then I met a girl, she gave me a kiss, I discovered a world whеre the door says 'yes'.”

Byrne milks mundane opposites (“love is cold, love is hot”) and is mostly playful, as on I Met The Buddha at a Downtown Party where the Buddha says: "I had to retire from that enlightenment biz. I don't have the answers, and I never did . . . I'm not that smart”.

One song is I'm An Outsider. 

So, who is the sky?

It's this guy having gently provocative, amiable and danceable fun.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.