David Byrne reunited with his Talking Heads bandmates in 2023 to promote the rerelease of their 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense, but anyone holding out hope for a reunion tour will be disappointed.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Byrne says doing press for the movie together resulted in him and his bandmates – Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison and Tina Weymouth – feeling “more comfortable with one another” but it won’t lead to anything else.
“I didn’t feel like, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s go out on tour again.’ Or, ‘Let’s make another record,'” he says. “Musically, I’ve gone to a very different place. And I also felt like there’s been a fair number of reunion records and tours. And some of them were probably pretty good. Not very many.”
“It’s pretty much impossible to recapture where you were at that time in your life,” he adds. “For an audience … that was formative music for them at a particular time. They might persuade themselves that they can relive that, but you can’t.”
But Byrne says he can “totally understand” why fans want a Talking Heads reunion tour.
“I’m a music fan like other people,” he says, noting there are bands that have broken up that he’s missed.
“But you realize you can’t turn the clock back,” he says. “When you hear music at a certain point in your life, it means a lot. But it doesn’t mean you can go back there and make it happen again.”
Byrne is set to release a new solo album, Who is the Sky?, on Sept. 5 and just released another song from the record, “The Avant Garde,” to digital outlets.
He’s also hitting the road on a new tour that kicks off Sept. 14 in Providence, Rhode Island. A complete list of dates can be found at DavidByrne.com.
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