He may be touting the new album, American Utopia, on his current US tour, but David Byrne knows the fans also want the old Talking Head songs, so they are getting a few at his concerts, songs that have "enough wiggle room."
"I’m lucky, " says the adventurous musician, talking recently to the Washington Post. " I think that the songs as they were written, most of them, have enough wiggle room in them that you can have application throughout the years.
"They don’t seem like, "Oh, this song is so ’80s" or whatever. So I can kinda find fresh meaning in the stuff and, depending on what I choose to do, I can integrate older stuff along with newer stuff and it seems to work for the most part."
The jounalist asked the former Talking Heads frontman if he still had the famous giant suit he wore on the 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense. In that movie, the idiosyncratic performer billowed and bowled around a huge stage in a suit that was surely five sizes too big for him.
"The specifics of where it is, I don’t know. It actually went on tour with a museum show for a while, " Byrne replied. "It might be on loan to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but it has gone out and sometimes it comes back and it’s in a very large box. When it comes back, that’s where it goes in my office, and then sometimes it goes out again on its own. It has its own life."
