Life During Wartime
David Byrne at Frost Amphitheater, April 16, 2026
Being a former music critic, you’d think that I would take joy in people asking me for my music suggestions but if there was one thing I learned in that position, it was never, ever, volunteer to pick the music for something; it’s a fool’s game. I don’t even like d-jaying for myself, to be honest. Having grown up on radio, I love the thrill of another person’s random pick coming up unexpectedly in my ears, whether I know the song or not. Sometimes I make myself a playlist for a long-haul flight, and I find I am bored with those songs by the time I am on my return one.
Recently, however, my coach at diving practice asked me to choose the music, and I blanked. “Anything but classic rock,” I said, and he said, “But isn’t that your JAM?”
Sob. Later, I posted this on my feed asking for suggestions, and one friend commented, “Talking Heads!” Talking Heads are totally classic rock, but even so, I thought that was a great suggestion. Everyone likes Talking Heads, even little kids, though obviously they’ve only heard them through their parents. Last year I saw a super group with 1 ½ members play all of Remain in Light, and that was pretty fun. This weekend, I went to see David Byrne play a similar setlist, and it was also fun, but in entirely different way.
The Remain in Light tour (as you will find out if you click and read) was more a reminiscence of what a groove band is like at the height of its power. By contrast, Byrne’s performance is watchable, rather than groovable: it’s more like seeing theater than going to a club, but it’s actually neither. On stage, he conducts a 12-piece band, all dressed alike in jumpsuits and trainers the color of the first Talking Heads album but, rather than the usual static guitar/bass/drum set type combo, this band moves across the stage like a marching band in formation whilst dodging in and out of video backgrounds that make the stage into a deep, ever-moving wormhole. It is an illusion but the depth it creates in your mind is mesmerizing. There was one video taken by drone that wafted across the roofs of a neighborhood, and the video was so nimble that it could easily make you feel carsick.
It did me, anyway.
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The show was at Frost Amphitheater on the Stanford campus, a venue I can walk to. (I didn’t, but I could have, which is kind of why I went.) Near the beginning, Byrne broadcast on the screen behind him some recent pictures he’d taken of places around this town while tooling about on his bicycle. One was of the Tesla dealership. Another was of some used tires by the Baylands. Both were of scenes of places that we, who live here, can see at any moment, but by including them in this show, Byrne allowed us in on a different perspective, his, and this, I think is his greatest talent. In his work – for example, the film American Utopia which is about marching bands – he fixes his gaze on something we thought we knew and creates new thoughts in us about them.
This show drew from both Talking Heads and Byrne’s solo work, which is far more whimsical: in both cases, the songs tend not to be about individual feelings or events so much as about moods: head spaces, or maybe just space in general. Indeed, so many of the songs are about physical space that it reminded me of this very famous quote about rock music, often attributed to Frank Zappa, which goes, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s meant as a BIG BURN on rock critics, but I’ve always thought it was a burn on whoever says it, especially since the quote is usually trotted out by bands who’ve gotten bad reviews. Besides, dancing about architecture wouldn’t be difficult, any dancer could show how it makes them feel or how it constricts their movements.
Anyway, the point is that David Byrne has written many songs about buildings, including a newer one called “My Apartment Is My Friend.” The Heads’ second album was called “More songs about buildings and food,” for god’s sake, and the choruses of his two most famous songs are shoutouts to houses. In fact, the entire set was highly informed by architecture, writ large, from the video landscapes that gave depth to the performance, to the subject of the songs themselves. Indeed, now that I think about it, so many of his songs refer explicitly to architecture in some way that it may even be that he is slyly referencing the original quote.
This show drew from both his older and newer, solo work, and it was absorbing and enjoyable whether you knew the songs or not, because there was a lot to look at. For the most part his music is lighthearted, evoking a mood that is lightly ironic and wholly arty, and at this juncture, when both those things feel swamped by reality, it feels good to immerse oneself in the warmth of that standpoint.
But there’s no real escape from the precarity of now, is there? So it was impossible to listen to the song “Life During Wartime” without thinking how awful it was that one is now listening to it, well, during wartime. I am deadly sure Talking Heads never meant that song to be prescient but what are we meant to think at lyrics like:
Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?
You oughta know not to stand by the window
Somebody see you up there.
Alas. Throughout the song I was reminded of the meme, “Nobody thought the revolution would start in Minneapolis. Except Prince.”
And I thought also about Alex and Renee, and the six other death-by-Ice victims, not to mention the thousand others which have been incurred in the last few months elsewhere, and I mourned for a time when we could joke about surveillance as the song’s lyrics do; when we could yell, “This ain’t no party! this ain’t no disco!” with irony, rather than, as we have to do now, a kind of sickly comprehension. When, near the end, the background finally exploded into images of ICE targets and protests, beginning with that famous video of that kid on a bike who evades them after making them run around like chickens, the crowd let out a collective sigh of contentment.
These days the lyrics of that song speaks for itself; I am sure everyone listening to it was having the same thoughts. But then, that is why we go to concerts, to think the same thoughts as a crowd of people we are in. To feel just a little bit stronger.