David Byrne’s American Utopia: A Way We Could Work This

Something detonated in me, seeing all of this after COVID-19. Looking at people? That’s the best, Byrne says, just before that naive melody begins. I started crying again, just like I would two years later during the rerelease of Stop Making Sense, at 10 a.m. in a theater studded with searchers, when my second baby was three months old and my thirteen-year-old dog was days away from euthanasia and the bombardment of Gaza had begun. I’m just an animal looking for a home, he sang. Share the same space for a minute or two. Then, now, always, the song makes me think: How simple our desires are. How complex we make them. How possible it is, actually, to simplify them again. How the desire to make something great and the desire to take care of each other come together in the feeling of love, in the sound of a love song, one like this—one that says that the reality of detachment can be the wellspring for a never-ending plea for connection, that a pinnacle of human achievement can be built from a little guileless loop.

The same questions that thrummed through me while watching American Utopia are ever-present today: How do you make the material of ordinary life transcendent? How do you do it against a backdrop of unbelievable suffering? How do you hold those things side by side? How do you work this? In a talk-show interview for the fortieth anniversary of Stop Making Sense, Byrne explained the phrase. He was talking to himself a little bit, he said: “Don’t be so rational all the time. Maybe sometimes trust your instinct, trust your feelings, trust those kinds of things, and see what happens.” Maybe the answer is still the same as it ever was—maybe it has a lot to do with whatever lets you wear a lightness in your bearing but keep a gravity in your heart. With insisting on a pathway to freedom and nonsense and ecstasy for yourself, and, crucially, for others—all of them. In the dark theater, at the end of American Utopia, I looked at my new friend Lizzy, the stage lights making her face glow a little, her hands over her heart just like mine were. The ache, the great answer to the ache. When we walked out of the theater, everything was golden. Back on a crowded main street in Brooklyn, I felt so lucky to be among these people, riding their bikes, carrying their bags of groceries, flirting and fighting, passing the time. I came across a friend of mine at a sidewalk table outside a bar. Then my partner came out of our front door, holding our baby. Everyone was smiling. I think about that day as one of the perfect ones I’ll be granted in this life.