David Byrne is standing on the moon looking at earth. Byrne has just finished singing a tender, string-driven version of Talking Heads’ “Heaven.” The massive video screen behind him at the Wang Theatre makes the earth look beautiful and delicate.
“There she is,” Byrne tells the packed house. “Our heaven.”
Over three nights at the Wang, Byrne and his backing ensemble of a dozen dancers and musicians carried the audience through the 73-year-old icon’s vision of the world: optimism with a dose of realism, buoyant pop beat shot through with influences from the avant-garde and a score of genres from across the globe.
Like Byrne’s 2018-2019 “American Utopia” tour or Broadway show, the trek supporting new album “Who Is the Sky?” features a group unburdened by wires, amps, and pedals. The stage is clean with the guitarist, bassist, a handful of percussionists and the rest using wireless instruments and microphones so they can roam freely. Only they don’t roam freely. Meticulously choreographed by Steven Hoggett, the “Who Is the Sky?” show has the whole ensemble dancing, spinning, marching, twisting, and turning along with rotating images on 20-foot-tall high-def screens, everything bolstering the songs’ messages.
Some of those messages can be a little childlike. Always conceptual and yet visceral, Byrne has written an album of songs about simple pleasures and pains (see Friday night’s versions of “Everybody Laughs,” “I Met The Buddha At A Downtown rave,” “My Apartment Is My Friend”). But he curated his back catalog to find the right material to reinforce or undercut the new songs.
“And She Was,” “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” and even his existential masterpiece, “Once in a Lifetime,” pushed Byrne’s current ethos of hope, wonder, and unity. To make sure it wasn’t all flowers and homey thoughts, the tight, relentless and pulsating rhythms crashed in with some menace on “Houses in Motion” and “Slippery People” and had a tense fury.
The biggest contrast with the dominant optimism of the night, the communal spirit, came late in the show with “Life During Wartime.” Dressed in matching blue suits for the night, Bryne and the troupe became almost swallowed up in a wall of blue on the screens. But as the dark song drove on, the blue shattered into ugly images of modernity: boiling political rallies, police brutality, war, chaos.
To open the encore, Byrne came to the stage alone and explained a breakthrough he had as the pandemic came to an end. Riding his bike around New York City, he discovered people were walking and talking and interacting again. No matter how bad things get, no matter how close we are to the life depicted in “Life During Wartime,” “people love being together,” he said.
Then Byrne and band jumped into a joyous gospel version of “American Utopia” tune “Everybody’s Coming To My House” and a huge singalong in “Burning Down the House.”
Byrne believes that “Heaven” is community, and he wants the audience to feel that, if just for a night.
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