Their relationship goes all the way back to the early days of Talking Heads, and they worked together on classic albums like Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
David Byrne‘s ongoing U.S. tour is packed with vintage Talking Heads songs and selections from his new LP Who Is the Sky? But he’s also played a new song every night called “T-Shirt” that nobody heard prior to opening night. He’s just dropped a video for it, and revealed that it was co-written with Brian Eno.
The video shows a montage of T-shirts containing slogans like “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History,” “Make America Gay Again,” “Fight Today For a Better Tomorrow!,” “Embrace Differences,” “Say Perhaps to Drugs,” “Human Rights Are Not Optional,” and “No Kings.”
Byrne’s relationship with Brian Eno goes back to the 1978 Talking Heads LP More Songs About Building and Food. They also worked together on 1978’s Fear of Music and 1980’s Remain in Light. Outside of the Talking Heads, Eno and Byrne teamed up on the 1981 collaborative album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. In 2008, they came back together to record Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. Byrne supported it with the Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno Tour where he only played songs they made together, both solo and with Talking Heads.
In his recent Rolling Stone Interview, Byrne recalled how Eno first came into his life. “When [Talking Heads] were starting out, we were big fans of the Velvet Underground,” he said. “John Cale and Lou Reed came to see us at CBGB. We met with Lou Reed a couple of times. He wanted to sign us to a management-production deal. But it was a little bit too much like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if we’re ready for this.’ We pulled back. John introduced us to Brian Eno on our first trip to London, and that proved to be a big deal for us.”
Byrne’s Who Is the Sky? tour continues Tuesday night at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. It will keep him on the road until it wraps March 19, 2026, in Paris.
