The digital deluxe edition of Who Is the Sky? from David Byrne includes four additional tracks, among them a fresh visual for the up-tempo “My Madness,”. His accompanying remarks treat the entire undertaking as an open question: what constitutes an album today?
“Albums can be super long, super short, and the songs can change over time,” Byrne said in a statement. “The only consistent thing might be that the songs were composed and recorded around a similar time — so they speak to that time and place, and have some sort of sonic continuity.”
The Songs That Got Left Out
Out of the four bonus tracks, two were left over from the original recording. Byrne gives his reason for leaving them off the first release.
“‘My Madness’ — this is one of my personal favorites — the singer imagines their ‘madness’ as a separate entity from themselves, one that they come to love, understand and respect. There’s a reconciliation.”
Two of the tracks are brand-new recordings. One of these is “What and Where”, while the other is a Spanish-language remake of a song from Byrne’s previous work, performed with vocals from Natalia Lafoucade, who also helped write it. The original version had Hayley Williams singing on it.
The Video For “My Madness”
The deluxe version comes with a psychedelic visual accompaniment for “My Madness.”. In it, a man dressed in a vivid, leonine outfit spins out yellowish spirals while Byrne sings “My madness really likes me now,” accompanied by horns, an acoustic guitar, and finally strings.
It’s a strange and cheerful image for a song about madness. Byrne’s lyrics treat the condition as a separate entity that the singer learns to love, understand, and respect — a reconciliation rather than a fight.
What The Title Actually Came From
The album takes its name from a text message that went wrong. Byrne explained the source of the title during a Rolling Stone interview from last year.
“Somebody was sending me a text using voice-to-text, and the algorithm got it a little bit wrong. And what came up on my phone was ‘Who is the sky?’ And I thought, ‘That’s a beautiful phrase.’ I know what they were really saying — it’s pretty easy to tell, in English anyway. But I thought, ‘I’m going to put that on the list of album titles.'”
The End Of The Tour
The expanded release arrives a year after the original Who Is the Sky? first appeared. It lands alongside the close of Byrne’s run of shows backing that record.
Before the season ends, he’ll perform twice more. A stop at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga, New York comes on Thursday. Saturday finds him at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.
The Brutalist filmmaker Brady Corbet shot Byrne’s multi-night stint at Baltimore’s Hippodrome on 70mm film for an upcoming concert picture.
The Book That Comes Next
Byrne’s next project is a book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, out Oct. 6. He writes about how many geniuses — from Bach to Bruegel, Vermeer to Melville — weren’t recognized in their time.
The author’s purpose in writing the book is to assist readers in recognizing originality when they encounter it rather than overlooking it. He has scheduled several tour dates to promote it.
The Book Tour Stops
Across the nation and into Canada, the book’s tour dates extend their reach. The schedule is laid out below.
- Oct. 6 — New York, NY @ Riverside Church (presented by McNally Jackson)
- Oct. 10 — Toronto, ON @ Koerner Hall (presented by TIFA and Type Books)
- Oct. 11 — San Francisco, CA @ Sydney Goldstein Theater (presented by City Arts & Lectures)
- Oct. 13 — Los Angeles, CA @ Robert Frost Auditorium (presented by Live Talks Los Angeles)
- Oct. 14 — Seattle, WA @ Meany Center for the Performing Arts (Town Hall Seattle & Elliott Bay Book Company)
- Oct. 15 — Chicago, IL @ Athenaeum Theatre (Chicago Humanities and Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture)
Why The Album Keeps Changing
The fixed object is no longer the only model for records, according to Byrne’s point about albums changing over time. Songs can change over time, and albums can be longer or shorter. This is a useful corrective to how we think about records.
His own work supports this claim. The deluxe edition doesn’t serve as a substitute; it adds more material instead. The songs came from roughly the same period, reflect that moment and location, and carry a shared sound. Yet the set remains open to growth.
The ability to change is the whole idea behind it. Once upon a time, records were physical objects limited to a set number of sides. Today, they are collections of material that grow as new pieces are added over time.
What To Listen To First
The extra tracks provide a place to begin. “My Madness” stands as the visual high point, and it remains Byrne’s own preferred choice. The Lafoucade collaboration is the boldest addition, a Spanish-language reinterpretation of a song from his earlier catalog.
The expanded edition is available now. The book follows in October.
Across his career, Byrne has kept reaching beyond where music ends, and the deluxe edition of Who Is the Sky? shows him doing it again. He is not setting a moment in stone — he is building outward from it.
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