May 16, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic witnesses a concert that scrambles her idea of the power of pop by shifting the focus away from the star at its center.

Brianna Bryson/Getty Images

Hello fellow humans,

Last weekend, on a night so temperate and rejuvenating that it felt like the very definition of spring, my concertgoing companion and I headed to Nashville’s riverside amphitheater to finally catch what many have been calling the show of the year. David Byrne and his band have been traveling the continent in support of his 2025 album Who is the Sky? since last fall, on a tour that by its end will encompass more than 100 global dates. At a time when many big-name artists are canceling engagements, partly due to low ticket sales, the 74-year-old oddball who found art-rock fame nearly 50 years ago leading the Talking Heads has just added an entire Asian leg to his itinerary, and is selling out venues wherever he brings his ensemble.

In the days leading up to the Nashville show, which followed a set at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival in March, I ran into several people who were on their second go-round. As we walked together over the pedestrian bridge near the venue, one told me that despite high ticket prices and hard times making this a luxury buy, she was determined to join in any joy she could find, and this performance was a guaranteed high. She wasn’t disappointed — “that was like a GenX spring tent revival,” she texted me afterwards.

Walking back across the bridge to our car, noticing that somehow the drone of the cover bands playing ‘90s rock out of every window on Lower Broadway now sounded like a flock of nightingales, I wondered what had happened in that amphitheater that seemed to rejuvenate a Nashville that has lately been torn asunder. (Not a real fix, I know! But that’s how leaving a truly transcendent concert feels.) Byrne was charming, he told funny stories that made him seem both vulnerable and wise and the visuals filling giant screens behind the band were sublime. None of those things seemed unique, though; it was standard arena pop stuff, with an arthouse twist. The spectacle wasn’t the point, I realized — except in one capacity. The performers had made all the difference. Not as individuals. It was the collective that raised the crowd’s spirit.

Crooning and yelping as he has since his 20s, Byrne often stood out from his ensemble, yet he was never really the focal point. Instead, everyone on stage danced, gestured and made noise together to give his songs new shapes that seemed to unfold spontaneously, though of course everything was choreographed. There was no division among singers, dancers and musicians; the usual rock-band hierarchies fell away. Byrne, who’s been working toward this high point with Broadway projects and his last tour and subsequent concert film, American Utopia, told Variety that the breakthrough moment came on that previous tour, when he decided to make his troupe fully mobile, with no one encumbered by instruments or microphones that forced them to stay in a fixed spot. (A combination of wireless audio, MIDI technology and real-time tracking makes that possible.) “It kind of democratized the band and the performers,” he said.

Byrne’s casual explanation doesn’t capture the power of this musical democracy, which doesn’t merely offer every performer a brief turn in the spotlight, but instead enacts the nightly birth of a fully integrated organism whose parts can’t be separated from the whole. I was struck throughout the night at Byrne’s willingness to lean back, to let the expanded bank of backup singers carry not just a chorus but an entire song, and to place himself at the back of the group as they went through their dabbing and shimmying paces. Soloists would step out momentarily before returning to the hive, and Byrne’s voice remained distinctive within the mix. But this was a group effort in every way.

The effect was like watching a cell multiply: egoless growth. Byrne is one of rock’s quirkiest voices, his expressiveness instantly recognizable, and yet here he continually surrendered his individuality in service to the music and dancing as a whole. Yet at the same time, neither he nor his ensemble surrendered their personal flair. With its choral singing and marching band-inspired choreography, this was a beautiful example of how people can become so enmeshed in nurturing an idea, together, that their own signature moves and limitations fade into the background. An idea, as Byrne suggested, that has a fundamental relationship to democracy.

The lure of multiplied voices is always a useful tool in popular music. We hear it put to use right now in hits by Olivia Rodrigo and Olivia Dean, with their multitracked choruses that encourage singing along. We also hear it in the songs Noah Kahan fans embrace the most vociferously as they come together in stadiums to wail out his anthemic choruses, which are perfectly designed for that boundary-dissolving, self-affirming experience.

We can see a similar energy transferred to bodies in the viral video of the moment, the latter portion of “Storm,” the short film starring the rapper Yung Lean, which is part of a larger multimedia project called GENER8ION, created by dance music producer Surkin and filmmaker Romain Gavras. It shows a screen packed full of uniformed schoolkids dancing with paradoxically loose precision and coordination, creating wave after wave of patterns that seem to absorb each of them into a swirling mass without ever diminishing the vital energy of each young man’s performance.

It’s also there in the latest offering from The Rolling Stones, a band that’s always chased (and often captured) the zeitgeist. In the new Francois Rousselet-directed video for “In the Stars,” a typical stomper from the band’s upcoming album Foreign Tongues, Mick, Keith and Ronnie are de-aged using AI technology, a choice that has predictably raised the ire of some fans.

What’s more interesting is the way the video, depicting a quintessential Exile on Main St.-era jam session crowded with hangers-on, morphs into an argument for music as an engine of communal rebirth, just as Byrne’s show does. The viewer slowly realizes that the crowded room where the Stones play is actually filled with doubles — many drummers, guitarists, strutting dancers and other noisemakers who’ve absorbed the band’s example and, in a way, become them. (Actress Odessa A’zion steals the show in the crucial role of Marianne Faithfull/Anita Pallenberg.) It’s a great metaphor for both rock’s democratic spirit — as my colleague Hazel said, “Anyone can be the Stones” — and for the legacy of a foundational group. As Hazel also pointed out, if those vain old Englishmen had just allowed themselves to look their age, it would have been much more powerful.

Byrne looks every bit the 70-something onstage with his ensemble, executing choreographer Annie-B Parson’s genius moves with a spryness that never hides his age. His collaborators make the performance possible, and he’s happy to be one with them. What makes Byrne and company’s performance so uplifting is the ease and satisfaction they convey within this enactment of surrendering to a whole without losing yourself. It’s a dream of cooperation — something in short supply, in our current public life — and a remedy for the isolation that feels, in this decade, like both an affliction and an addiction.

In the most memorable banter he offered between songs, the screen filled with a 360-degree image of his stunning New York apartment, and he talked about spending the pandemic alone there, cooking and drawing and watching nature programs. (Was his bride, Mala Gaonkar, whom he’s known for more than a decade, with him? Not for the purposes of this show.) The song those stories set up, “My Apartment Is My Friend,” is about losing touch with others so profoundly that you anthropomorphize your living space. Even post-COVID, such occurrences seem readily possible in 2026. The blooming organism Byrne is bringing worldwide offers a vision of a way out of that illusion of singularity.

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Here are a few things that have made me want to do a little David Byrne dance this week

As the Nashville spring gives way to humid summer, I’m happy to have a new Shakey Graves album to take me into hazy season. The brand new Fondness, Etc. has the Austin singer-songwriter in domestic mode, reflecting on new parenthood in his charmingly shambolic way.
I have a huge head. If you do, too, and want to be protected during the sunny times ahead, I can tell you: This hat will fit your noggin. (I got it in green, without a college logo, but Roll Tide.)
It’s been a great week for duos. My fave babies hey, nothing returned with another slice of divine emotionally wrecked rock, “Boat Garage” — a song that feels akin to Wednesday, in the best ways. And the mysterious East Anglian pair that goes by the name The Healing Power of Horses dropped a nicely trippy taste of what’s to come with “i wait, i sink” as a way of announcing that they’ve signed to the supercool label section1.
Country star Ashley McBryde gets personal in her new video for “What if We Don’t,” a song that she says is about being at peace with questions that can’t be answered.
I treasure this deep dive by Marcus J. Moore into the story behind one of my favorite albums, Minnie Riperton’s debut Come To My Garden.
You know what’s underrated? Escarole.

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