“She put a cassette recorder or something under the bed,” Byrne says. “She knew what was coming, and she got insurance. Then eventually they were released, and people transcribed them. It is jaw-dropping.”

Byrne circa 2018 is a far-out impresario who makes intriguing solo albums on the side but makes his most profound statements in the medium of spectacle. The Imelda musical. The tour with St. Vincent for their collaborative album, Love This Giant. The oddly and profoundly moving Contemporary Color, the live event Byrne staged in Brooklyn at the Barclays Center in 2015, which featured high school color-guard teams from around the country doing synchronized flag-and-saber dance routines to live music by Dev Hynes, Nelly Furtado, and tUnE-yArDs.

Later, watch Bill and Turner Ross's documentary about this event, Contemporary Color, an earnest but uncorny celebration of athleticism as art as a model for humane democracy. Byrne appears only briefly as a performer and mostly as a ringmaster, striding determinedly around backstage in a V-neck sweater, looking like Mister Rogers had he done acid in the '60s. Think about the ad hoc utopia created inside the Barclays Center for the length of this concert, and how maybe this is the most useful thing a rock person with a platform can do right now.

Fly home. Read the full text of William Blake's “Jerusalem.” Note that while Blake may be surrounded by the industrial age's “dark Satanic Mills,” he ends the poem vowing not to lay down his sword or “cease from Mental Fight” until “we have built Jerusalem, / In England's green & pleasant Land.”

Consider this in light of Byrne's current projects. If there's a unifying message in all of it, maybe it's that optimism isn't a force field or a mood elevator. It's a practice, a kind of daily workout, a mental fight. You can choose to crawl in a hole and glumly refresh Twitter. Or you can start bookmarking stories in which some small piece of society isn't burning down and actually seems to be working. Maybe you go out into the world with that, tell everyone you can. Sing a few songs about donkey dicks while you're at it.

It is, among other things, a living. It is literally a living: One of the many things Byrne's How Music Works explains is how he makes money off his records. There are some convincing charts. It boils down to making albums cheaply and involving a record label as late in the process as possible, if at all. It helps that Byrne has writing credit, often sole writing credit, on all those Talking Heads songs that have never gone anywhere; his old stuff gets up and goes to work on his behalf on jukeboxes and restaurant playlists every day.

Whether American Utopia will even dent the Zeitgeist is hard for Byrne to predict, or maybe just hard for him to care about. These are the kinds of songs he's making now. If the David Byrne speaking through them is more difficult for some people to project themselves onto than the skinny, rattled guy with the pocket full of Thorazine, he can do no more about that than he can about tomorrow's weather.

“I think I write better melodies now than I used to. But in some ways I also realize”—he laughs—“that that doesn't matter.”

Request clarification on this last point.

“Better for who?” Byrne says. “I might enjoy singing more. I might find it more emotional to sing a melody I've written recently. But then I think about ‘Psycho Killer,’ which is a very simple melody. And I realize, ‘Okay, just because you think you've improved doesn't mean you're necessarily going to connect with more people.’ Not always. Sometimes, yes, but not always.”

Like everybody else, he lives in a world where Talking Heads never went away. There are worse albatrosses. It doesn't stop him from eating at the kind of restaurant where there's always a Talking Heads song or two on the playlist—maybe even “Psycho Killer,” a song he wrote in his college apartment, before he had a famous band or a New York address. Usually when it happens his mind is elsewhere. He's thinking about bike racks or how he's never been to Uzbekistan. Somebody else at the table has to direct his attention to the music, pointing up at the speaker.

Psst—David!

David, that's you.

Alex Pappademas is a writer who lives in Los Angeles in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife.

A version of this story originally appeared in the May 2018 issue with the title "The Name Of This Artist Is David Byrne"