Very few popular songwriters have as many instantly hummable, building-oriented tunes in their catalogues as David Byrne. It's way beyond "Burning Down the House"; take a closer look at the entirety of Byrne's 38-year output, working with Talking Heads, Brian Eno or any of a dozen other musical collaborators. Instead of writing love songs that focus on interpersonal rapture, Byrne tends to frame his romanticism in potentially isolating structures: dry ice factories, wartime brownstones, shotgun shacks. Byrne's lyricism is usually never content to celebrate love between people; it's a celebration of love between people and structures. Notably, the way structures and spaces influence relationships isn't a tract in an out-of-print textbook but a danceable groove.

In tracks "Don't Worry About the Government", "Cities", and "Strange Overtones", Byrne explores the buoyant (if misguided) expansionist mindset of late capitalism, the suburban isolation resulting from utopian mid-century urban planning, and the Great Recession-era social retrenching. "Don't Worry About the Government" places the joy of work and life firmly in the hands of expanding infrastructure; Byrne makes comparisons between civil servants and his loved ones, although his main focus is the inherent power of the building itself: "my building has every convenience / it’s gonna make life easy for me."

My building has every convenience

It's gonna make life easy for me

It's gonna be easy to get things done

I will relax alone with my loved ones

- “Don't Worry About the Government”, Talking Heads, Talking Heads: 77 (1977)

"Cities", meanwhile, is less satirical, more haunting. Here, a neurotic Byrne dips in and out of various cities, from London to Birmingham, trying to find the ideal mix of density, light, and culture. His take on Birmingham, with its largely empty houses and dry ice factory, is a portrait of a city lacking citizenry, a place that has been planned not to inspire culture but to eradicate it.

Lot of rich people in Birmingham

Lot of ghosts in a lot of houses

Look over there! Dry ice factory

Good place to get some thinking done

- "Cities", Talking Heads, Fear of Music (1979)

Meanwhile, "Strange Overtones" celebrates the seemingly unfashionable artistic impulse to create joy, even in circumstances of austerity. The subject of the song, a hapless singer who is overheard being joyous but not clever in the apartment next door, wants to reach out to "those standing out in the cold." The reference to an earlier era – "those beats are 20 years old" – underscores the notion of a far more vibrant time that is now considered unfashionable.

You're in the next apartment

I hear you singing over there

This groove is out of fashion

Those beats are 20 years old

I saw you lend a hand to

The ones out standing in the cold

- "Strange Overtones", David Byrne and Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (2008)

In 1986, Byrne took on the beautiful weirdness of late 20th century capitalism, making a film, True Stories, that is probably the most entertaining (and elegantly satirical) movie ever made about urban planning. Although films such as Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) had certainly explored similar themes, True Stories remains the most fun, cut to a lone white-collar worker dancing ecstatically in his knock-off Miesian glass boxed office.primarily because it works as a series of discrete music videos held together with tongue-in-cheek conceptual analysis and snippets of “city” life. In the film, property developer Earl Culver (played by Spalding Gray) gives a three-minute lecture about the changing nature of the economy by way of representative asparagus, lobster, and peppers at a dinner table. As Culver joyously hurls food into the air in a climax of exposition, we cut to a lone white-collar worker dancing ecstatically in his knock-off Miesian glass boxed office.

In another scene, our omnipresent cowboy-dud-wearing narrator Byrne takes us through a mall, a microprocessor assembly plant, and a housing tract while eerie, whispery music plays in the background. "It's an imaginary landscape, a place to raise your kids. Of course, nowadays, nobody's having kids, what with the end of the world coming up and all," Culver notes, before walking Byrne out into a bramble-strewn field. This idiosyncratic survey of a vintage middle class American outlook has become a historical gem, perfect for schoolkids curious about why the 20th century ended up the way it did. The movie merrily foreshadows trends in the U.S.’s next century, when a "career" would no longer entail a lifetime with one employer, and people would, on average, if at all, start marrying later and have fewer children. From an urban planning standpoint, this has accompanied a resurgence of the urban core as desirable real estate, as opposed to the tumble-weed environs of suburbia. True Stories depicts a reality that, ordinarily, would have been lumped into a series of spreadsheets and bar graphs, but in Byrne’s vision, is both joyous and animated.

In his 2009 book The Bicycle Diaries, Byrne pedals though numerous metropolises around the world including Berlin, Buenos Aires and Los Angeles, noting their relative accessibility, infrastructure, and cultural health. It's a real-life extension of his quasi tour-guide role in True Stories, but this time he's openly obsessed with the harmful nature of outdated planning thinking. In his role as pedestrian, Byrne contextualizes seemingly overwhelming issues for people who haven't endured an urban planning 101 course. Explaining that most U.S. cities are not very bike-friendly, Byrne says: "Lives, city planning, budgets, and time are all focused Economics is revealed in shop fronts and history in doorframesaround the automobile...How did it get this way? Maybe we can blame Le Corbusier for his 'visionary' Radiant City proposals in the early part of the last century." He goes on, "I also believe that a visitor staying briefly can read the details, the specifics made visible, and then the larger picture, and the city's hidden agendas emerge almost by themselves. Economics is revealed in shop fronts and history in doorframes. Oddly, as the microscope moves in for a closer look, the perspective widens at the same time." His thoughtful approach to what could have been a mildly amusing travelogue transforms the book into both a historical document and a larger global question: What kind of cities do we want in our future? Like an upbeat Jane Jacobs, Byrne seems to say that while we can't pretend we haven't made mistakes, we can learn to better identify them, and become more critical users of our cities.

Byrne continued to explore space and the impact it has on culture with his highly accessible 2010 TED Talk, "How Architecture Helped Music Evolve," in which he traced the development of music composition as dependent on its intended venue. He argues that the arpeggios of Bach would have been vastly different had they not been performed inside an 18th century cathedral, but instead in the acoustically flat, packed room of CBGB, where Talking Heads first began performing in the late 1970s. He sees similar developments in nature, noting that bird songs change depending on the acoustics of their specific habitat. This observation takes composing music out of the vacuum-space context of one's own head, and places it firmly into the shared space of performance. Essentially, Byrne's thesis is that the physical world shapes and changes how the creative impulse manifests itself. Musicians are, in some respect, always subtly embedding the architecture of their times within their music.

Byrne took this concept in a very literal direction with his installation "Playing the Building”. The equivalent of a brick and mortar organ, with fluted utility pipes, basso electrical boxes, and a series of mid-tonal steel columns, the piece debuted in Sweden in 2005 and eventually transformed three additional sites into working instruments, including the Battery Maritime Building in New York City. Each key on a traditional organ was rigged to "play" a particular part of the building, triggering rods that tapped girders or electrical currents that powered HVAC equipment. Byrne did not write a specific musical piece for any of the buildings, preferring instead to invite people to play the organ and experiment with the resulting cascade of sounds. On one level, people would experience the materiality and acoustics of the buildings in an unprecedented way. Who, after all, actively considers the musical key of the ceiling fan, or the timbre of the water pipes? 

Who, after all, actively considers the musical key of the ceiling fan, or the timbre of the water pipes?Individually working their way through a symphony of materials, visitors to the installation would ultimately create their own work of art. This act is, perhaps, the most tangible manifestation of Byrne's contribution. From Vitruvius to Koolhaas, architects have adopted any variety of ways to convey the magnificently complex scope of their discipline, often resorting to ever denser, more abstract texts and frenzied infographics. Byrne made it possible for someone off the street to sit down at a piano and start getting it immediately. By being as much a creator as he is an enthusiast, Byrne has placed the beauty of architecture and infrastructure into the pop cultural lexicon. It's a good place to get some thinking done.