Ever the overachiever, David Byrne has spent the last four months tackling his most ambitious project yet: cheerfulness. But not the kind we’ve seen from the Talking Heads legend before—the ecstatic type that once prompted him to flutter and convulse while yelping about infinity, or the esoteric intellectualism that resulted in books about bicycling as a window to urban psychology and the physics of music. No, the hill Byrne beckons us up now is the kind of retiring optimism that feels not just foreign to many Americans today, but willfully wrong.

Byrne has made no secret of his displeasure with our current president and the economic gulfs in his longtime home of New York—a few reasons why, in his words, “it often seems as if the world is going straight to hell.” But he has lately been offsetting such hopelessness with Reasons to Be Cheerful, a new multimedia project that basks in positivity through shared blog posts and TED-style roving lectures delivered by Byrne (occasionally in a dapper millennial pink blazer). With insights on everything from progress in prison reform to witty signs at the Women’s March, the 65-year-old is taking time to revel in the details that make the slog of modern life worth enduring.

Looking back at Byrne’s long career, it feels as though that same complicated joy has been his through line. Born in Scotland and raised in outer Baltimore, the former visual art student boosted Talking Heads to mainstream fame and critical adoration with his mix of wiry intelligence and dry detachment over effusively warm pop. Since the group’s split in 1991, in his reams of solo and collaborative projects, Byrne has dared to stay polarizing while maintaining his gift for bright pop hooks. American Utopia, his latest solo record, offers anxious, often surreal ruminations on gun violence, social consciousness, and personal relativism over deceptively brassy soca beats, peppy guitar, and chipper synths.

In his day-to-day life, his ears are still piqued, too. On a recent dim winter afternoon in downtown Manhattan, not far from where the Talking Heads once scorched the CBGB stage, he tells me about his morning, which involved soaking in a hot bath while listening to Janelle Monáe’s latest and watching a Detroit high school choir take on his new track, “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” for a gorgeous new music video. “Really nice things to wake up to,” he says.

Here are some of the other songs and albums that have soundtracked Byrne’s life, as told by the man himself.