A Spirit Dance in Orange
(November 4, 2025) – While most of Chicago’s costumed revelers were haunting bars and parties on Halloween night, David Byrne transformed a downtown stage into something stranger — and far more spiritual. It was the third of four shows he performed at the city’s Auditorium Theater, and this writer was among the nearly 4,000 people who attended the former Talking Heads frontman’s Oct. 31 revival.
Clad in matching orange suits, Byrne and his nimble troupe of dancers, percussionists, violinists and keyboardists performed not just music, but a kind of moving meditation. Their swaying, hand-waving gestures — half tai chi, half trance dance — blurred the line between rock concert and performance art in a way only Byrne could conjure. And it was all pure joy.
At 73, Byrne moved with the limberness of a man half his age. Maybe it’s the daily cycling through Harlem — by his own account — that keeps him spry, or maybe he’s simply found the perfect rhythm between mind and body, as his unique kind of dance would suggest.
Whatever the secret, it worked: for nearly two hours, Byrne led or mirrored the choreography of his ensemble, occasionally breaking into funky footwork that would’ve made his Stop Making Sense-era take note.
Vocally, Byrne remains a marvel of endurance and restraint. His signature half-spoken, half-sung delivery — that quirky “talk-singing” style that once set him apart from the CBGB crowd — now functions like a timeless instrument. It doesn’t require vocal theatrics, and for that reason a man his age can pull it off with ease. Unlike many peers of his vintage, he never had to modulate keys from the original recordings or lean on the audience’s sympathetic mercy to get through his immense catalogue. The old Talking Heads hits — “Once in a Lifetime,” “Life During Wartime,” “And She Was” — arrived in their original registers, as if they were still new.
A Setlist That Told Its Own Story
Byrne opened with his former band’s song “Heaven,” its refrain — “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens” — a serene, ironic overture. Ironic, especially, as each member of his entourage took the stage — some in clusters — until the floor was filled with a mob of dancers and musicians who were anything but unmoved. From the opening number on, the night unfolded like a motion-filled mixtape of Byrne’s mind art — with players assuming various positions on stage and Byrne’s songs weaving tales of technology, humanity, and, as he put it so eloquently, the thing that has guided much of his life’s work: that need for people to just talk to each other.
After “Heaven” came “Everybody Laughs,” which led into the hit “And She Was,” punctuated by Byrne’s tale of the latter song’s inspiration: a “hippie chick” who floated above a Yoo-Hoo factory in Baltimore—mentally, of course, and whilst on some sort of acid trip.
“Strange Overtones” and “Houses in Motion” turned the venue into a pulsing dance floor — the venue had welcomed this from the audience in a pre-show announcement — with “Motion” revealing Byrne’s underrated rhythmic chops as he half-rapped through the jam’s funky groove.
Mid-set, the songs “T-Shirt” (whose video accompaniment displayed various crowd-pleasing garment captions) and “(Nothing But) Flowers” paired humor with eco-dread, while “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” inspired one of several audience sing-alongs.
Later, “What Is the Reason for It” and “Like Humans Do” reminded fans that Byrne’s solo catalog holds its own warmth and wit.
Newer songs — “Don’t Be Like That,” “Independence Day,” and the humorous “Moisturizing Thing” — showed his reflective storytelling side, highlighted by the self-filmed apartment tour that accompanied “My Apartment Is My Friend,” a relatable reality for many of us during the pandemic that inspired the tune.
Then came “Slippery People,” which reignited the crowd’s dancing shoes, and “Hard Times,” an angular groove for an anxious age. I marveled at the fact that my introduction to the former tune came via a Staple Singers cover the family act once performed on Soul Train not long after The Talking Heads first recorded it.
The main set closed with the one-two-three punch of Talking Heads classics “Psycho Killer,” “Life During Wartime,” and “Once in a Lifetime” — Byrne’s lifelong tension between chaos and control woven through sound and motion. During “Life During Wartime,” protest footage filled the backdrop — including the now-famous Chicagoland video of the DoorDash delivery kid niftily evading ICE agents on Wacker Drive — making the decades-old anthem feel oddly current.
The encore was pure communal release: “Everybody’s Coming to My House” as open invitation, then his former group’s lone top-ten American hit, “Burning Down the House,” where orange lights flared, hands waved in unison, and the Halloween energy peaked in euphoric exorcism before the credits rolled signaling the show’s end.
Stories, Symbols & Subtext
Between songs, Byrne was more affable than his cool-intellectual reputation sometimes suggests. He peppered his set with stories, reflections, and sly humor — turning observations on architecture, consumerism, and aging into punchlines rather than lectures. This blogger particularly appreciated the undercurrent of resistance that ran throughout, which seemed less like uninformed protest and more like communal connection: resistance rendered as shared consciousness rather than rage.
By the finale, Byrne stood bathed in orange light, arms outstretched, head tilted skyward. The crowd — a mix of costumed younger fans and reverent devotees like yours truly — cheered as if they’d witnessed something familiar yet reborn. A Halloween séance led by rock’s most unassuming shaman.
At 73, Byrne is still experimenting with the new, and doing so very well, proving that both his concerts and his studio time remain laboratories of art, rhythm, and dance. And on this Halloween night in Chicago, the third of four nights he played there, he once again made the city his canvas.
And we were all the better for it.
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Setlist Recap (21 songs):
Heaven · Everybody Laughs · And She Was · Strange Overtones · Houses in Motion · T-Shirt · (Nothing But) Flowers · This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) · What Is the Reason for It · Like Humans Do · Don’t Be Like That · Independence Day · Slippery People · Moisturizing Thing · My Apartment Is My Friend · Hard Times · Psycho Killer · Life During Wartime · Once in a Lifetime · (encore) Everybody’s Coming to My House · Burning Down the House
DJRob
DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff! You can follow him on Bluesky at @djrobblog.bsky.social, X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog, on Facebook or on Meta’s Threads.
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