![]() ![]() ![]() "My wife puts up with a lot of crap," he said with an impish grin. A collection of photographs taken during his wanderings, culled from his 1995 book "Strange Ritual," is now touring museums. Family values be damned - the man is a full-time itinerant artist, spending most of his days combing the globe for new influences to blend into his music and new artists to record. When he isn't touring the world, he lives in Manhattan and helps run Luaka Bop, a label he founded in 1988 to produce his music and those of worldbeat acts he likes.Īs he comes out of his shell and into middle age, however, Byrne is making few concessions to conventionality. Byrne has some trappings of normality these days, including a wife, Bonny Lutz, and an 8-year-old daughter named Malu. I guess today when I'm up there, I'm compensating for something else - like having to live a normal life." "It's as though shy people need to perform or they're going to pick up a gun and kill a bunch of people, or do something obsessive like write a great novel. "Getting onstage was a form of compensation for a long time," he said, looking the same as he ever was, with just a few flecks of gray intruding on his close-cropped dark hair. But more than a decade after he showed up on the cover of Time magazine, anointed as "Rock's Renaissance Man," he sounds more at peace with fame's klieg lights than ever. Staring at his bowl of yogurt and raspberries, Byrne still occasionally resembles an unblinking mad scientist who'd rather be in his lab. He has also collaborated with avant-garde artists like composer Philip Glass and choreographer Twyla Tharp, and starred in the much-acclaimed 1984 concert film "Stop Making Sense." In 1986 he directed his own movie, "True Stories," and the following year won an Academy Award for his soundtrack for Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor." Throughout it all, he has projected that oddest of public personas: the introverted celebrity. First with Talking Heads and later as a solo artist, his music seemed to offer listeners several options: They could puzzle over the semi-sensical lyrics, try to decipher Byrne's cryptic onstage mannerisms, or just hit the floor and boogie. Melding elements of new wave, funk, African tribal rhythms and whatever else caught his ear, Byrne has spent much of the past 20 years crafting records as playfully befuddling as they are danceable. A Baltimorean during his teenage years, he returns to the area tonight to play Wolf Trap. Touring in support of his fifth and finest solo record, "Feelings," he has shed much of the ethereal diffidence and edgy intensity he's radiated since his varied adventures as a pop star and multimedia artist began. And I'm not as shy as I used to be."įor the first time in his two-decade career, Byrne finally seems comfortable in his skin. "I think I'm much more inclusionary, bringing new ideas and stuff in. ![]() "I'm less a tense-and-nervous-can't-relax kind of guy," said Byrne the morning after the show, groggily sipping coffee in a hotel restaurant. Now 45, Byrne has turned the tune into ghoulish, witty theater. When Byrne sang "Psycho Killer" in 1977 he came off as a jittery neurotic who was this close to actually cracking. The melody is familiar, but the delivery is new. "I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax." "I can't seem to face up to the facts," he deadpans to the crowd of about 2,000. With the lights dimmed, it looks as if the guy on the cover of "Gray's Anatomy" has come to life and is searching hard for a Bufferin and a glass of water. The former frontman for Talking Heads, and one of rock's most charmingly inventive weirdos, Byrne is wearing a head-to-toe bodysuit of painted-on muscle and bone. It's encore time at the Strand nightclub, and for a few eerie moments David Byrne seems to shuffle around the stage without his flesh. ![]()
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