David Byrne Expands His ‘Sky’ With Four Songs

David Byrne has never been especially interested in treating an album as a finished object. So perhaps it’s fitting that one year after Who Is the Sky? arrived on Matador, he’s decided to reopen the file. Byrne has today (Sept. 16) released a deluxe digital edition of his latest album featuring four bonus tracks, including the new single “My Madness,” a buoyant piece of orchestral pop in which the Talking Heads co-founder imagines a meeting — and eventual reconciliation — with his own unruly inner life.

The expanded edition also includes “T Shirt,” which Byrne says was added to the current tour set after being left off the original album, along with a new version of “What Is the Reason for It” created by Mexican Institute of Sound and co-written and sung by Natalia Lafourcade.

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In a statement explaining the decision to expand the album, Byrne offers a characteristically expansive meditation on what an album even means in the streaming era. “Vinyl fans and crate diggers have a sense of an album as fixed thing — a set of songs on a physical object — in a specific order that presumably the artist thinks makes for a cohesive listening experience,” he says. “But streaming and downloads turned all that on its head. Albums can be super long, super short, and the songs can change over time. 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.

The expanded edition adds to another busy year for Byrne that has included an elaborate world tour and companion concert film, plus turning Elon Musk’s own words into lyrics for “Let Me Sell You a Dream,” his original song for Alex Gibney’s Musk documentary. With the Who Is the Sky? trek wrapping Sept. 19 in New York, Byrne is shifting attention to his next book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, which arrives Oct. 6 in North America via Penguin Press.

He will support it with a New York event at Riverside Church on release date plus subsequent visits to Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, London, Brighton, Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh.

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