An Absolute Lightness

Everybody looked forward to Broadway show David Byrne American Utopia; I am talking about fantastic, legendary Talking Heads and David Byrne. In Europe, there is no one, single alternative/indie music party in the 80s, 90s, through the last 20 years without a Talking Heads song featuring the event. Talking Heads is the band that usually opens or closes all indie parties and DJ sessions in our part of Europe. Today, in his late 60s David features a Broadway show and a brand new Spike Lee’s musical film named the same. All critics agree that David Byrne works really hard on making people happy, not just with his art but also attitude. He is a white American icon with a black man musician soul, an absolute US utopia in the real meaning of that word with serious potential to become something that James Stewart was for white Americans after the World War II. And indeed, he is one of the healthier music icons that I have ever come across in my life, and I have met him at a press conference during his Lazy Eyeball Tour in Europe. He emits an absolute kindness and yes he is not a preaching politics and religion kind of person, he does not impose via media too much. He is a true, free-spirited, sunshine emanate person.   

The vibrant concert movie, premiering on HBO and HBO Max directed by Sike Lee had his premiere at the latest New York Film Festival. The film captures last year’s Broadway production a 105-minute film features a mix of Talking Heads favorites and songs from Byrne’s 2018 “American Utopia” album, and it is performed by Byrne and a group of barefooted dancers in suits, with handheld instruments. Here Byrne delivers interludes about the importance of connection, community, immigrants yes a little politics. For Byrne, his experience of utopia features the importance of a life affirmation. Byrne says over Zoom: “Everybody feels really great doing the show, it’s hard to explain. The songs, the choreography, everything we do generates that kind of feeling.” “It was right in his wheelhouse,” Byrne says.

And now just like the 1984 Talking Heads the concert film  “Stop Making Sense,” directed by Jonathan Demme Byrne’s Utopia may become another iconic, sample film.

American Utopia, however, features slightly reworked musical versions of Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place,” “Burning Down the House” and “Road to Nowhere.” I guess that the powerful moments may be a cover of Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout,” an incendiary protest song where Byrne chants the names of black people lost due to police violence in riots. “Spike said, ‘We’re going to bring family members into the theater,’ ” Byrne says. “The song itself is very emotional. And seeing those people whose sons and daughters had been murdered, I just thought what is going through their heads?” 

Utopia is to return to Broadway, next September, after the theater reopens again in the U.S. In the meantime, he’s focusing on the Reasons to be Cheerful project, which started as “self-therapy” in order to promote positivity.