David Byrne
Frost Amphitheatre
April 16, 2026
Photos by Philip Halperin
When I was 13 or 14 years old, for Christmas my dad got me a CD of the live Talking Heads album Stop Making Sense. My dad had notoriously horrible taste in music, but this was one of the few times that he tried to bridge a generational gap with me where it paid off. From then on I was a voracious listener of Talking Heads and all of their offshoots: Jerry Harrison’s solo career and work with The Modern Lovers, Tom Tom Club, and of course the music of David Byrne. Unfortunately I’ve missed David Byrne every time that he’s toured in the past for various reasons, but with the release of his new album Who Is The Sky? last year, I was not going to miss out on seeing him when he came through. All of that is to say that I had a lot of expectations when he took the stage at the Frost Amphitheatre.
Initially coming onstage with some of the members of his band, Byrne and company opened the show with a touching rendition of the Talking Heads classic “Heaven.” The song has a special place in my heart as one of the first songs on the aforementioned Stop Making Sense live album, and it was a touching performance. The stage visuals, which wrapped around both sides of the stage as well as behind and under the performers, had them transported to the surface of the moon, while the next song, “Everybody Laughs,” found everyone onstage being transported to Earth.
It can not be understated how important the visual element of David Byrne’s live show is. Each movement from Byrne and his band is carefully executed to coincide with specific visuals, such as during “Like Humans Do,” when a pre-recorded video of the band wearing animal masks played behind them, each movement in the video being executed live by the mask less band onstage. Later on, “Independence Day” had each musician’s name floating in space above where they were standing at any given moment, which, given how much they were dancing around, was incredibly impressive to see.
And then there’s the band themselves. Thirteen musicians join David Byrne onstage for this particular tour, with various percussionists playing deconstructed parts of kits while dancing along with the guitarists, keyboardist, and bassist, everyone’s instruments strapped to their body by some kind of harness. And Byrne, at 73 years old, kept up with them throughout the entire performance, dancing and waving his hands around just as much as anybody else onstage.
David Byrne is the kind of musician who doesn’t have to fall back on nostalgia. In that way he’s like Peter Gabriel or Depeche Mode. What I mean specifically is that it would be easy for him to tour all of the time just playing songs by Talking Heads. But instead he tours when he is releasing a new album, and mixes in his new material with the songs that people are more familiar with. And I was just as excited to see songs like “What Is The Reason For It” or “I Met The Buddha At A Downtown Party” as I was to see “Houses In Motion” or “Air.”
At one point during the show, David mentioned a quote from the film director John Cameron Mitchell about how “love and kindness are the most punk things you can do.” This wasn’t the only political statement throughout the evening. During “T Shirt,” a song about how one’s clothes can become their identity, various slogans flashed across the screen behind the band. The two that elicited the largest response from the crowd were “Make America Gay Again” and “No Kings.” Towards the end of the set during the song “Life During Wartime,” videos of protestors clashing with ICE agents across the country made up the majority of the stage visuals.
The setlist encompassed a giant portion of Byrne’s career, with only two Talking Heads albums not represented, a song that he did with Brian Eno, and material from four of his solo albums being represented. However, the two songs that got the biggest responses from the crowd were to be expected. First was “Once In A Lifetime,” which closed the main set and saw the visuals becoming more abstract until black spots were erratically projected onto the band as the song reached its blistering climax. The other song was the one that closed out the evening, “Burning Down The House.” The performance of it felt joyous and rapturous, and everybody in the venue was on their feet and dancing to one of the greatest songs of its era. The song, and the show as a whole, was joyous and felt monumental to me in a way that’s hard to describe. Every expectation that I had of what a David Byrne show was going to be were totally blown out of the water by Byrne and his band, and I hope that I have the opportunity to see him again in the future.
I don’t think that my dad ever saw Talking Heads live. I know for a fact that he never saw David Byrne touring, as he never went to concerts once I was born. This last January was the ninth anniversary of his passing. There was a moment while David Byrne and his band were playing “Slippery People,” another song performed on the Stop Making Sense live album, where I took in everything that I was seeing, time seemed to stop, and I thought to myself, This is for you, Dad.
