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David Byrne turns his latest live show into a concert film

Who Is The Sky? was shot at the Hippodrome in Baltimore, and it follows Stop Making Sense and American Utopia in his catalogue.

David Byrne

David Byrne, white-haired and in a bright blue jacket, speaks into a handheld microphone with one finger raised.
Byrne at a Stop Making Sense event during the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023. Photo: Cory Doctorow from Beautiful Downtown Burbank, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

David Byrne has turned his most recent live production into a film. A concert film capturing the Who Is The Sky? tour was shot over multiple sold out nights at the Hippodrome in Baltimore, his hometown venue, with Brady Corbet behind the camera. It is in post production, and distribution details have not been announced.

The project extends a long run of Byrne concert films. Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads document Stop Making Sense remains a reference point for the whole form, and Spike Lee's David Byrne's American Utopia put a later stage production on screen and won two Emmys.

The show being filmed has been on the road since September 2025 and has now played more than 150 performances across four continents. It puts Byrne on stage with 13 musicians, singers and dancers in constant movement, folding choreography, visual art and storytelling into one continuous piece rather than a sequence of songs.

The setlist reaches well past the 2025 album the tour is named for. It leans on Talking Heads material including Psycho Killer and Burning Down the House, and has revived the rarity Houses in Motion, which had not been played since 2009.

Corbet, whose The Brutalist collected 10 Oscar nominations and three wins, shot the Baltimore performances on both 8 perf and 15 perf 70mm. Byrne said afterwards that he had not understood what the format would do until Corbet sent him frames from it.

Byrne has a book on the way as well, Sleeping Beauties, about ideas and discoveries that were overlooked and later recovered. The film joins a busy stretch for the form in rock, alongside Cameron Winter's Carnegie Hall concert film heading to theaters and Amyl and the Sniffers lining up a concert film and a live album.

The facts

  • The concert film is titled Who Is The Sky?
  • Brady Corbet, director of The Brutalist, shot it
  • Filmed over multiple nights at Baltimore's Hippodrome
  • The tour has played more than 150 shows across four continents
  • The show puts Byrne onstage with 13 musicians, singers and dancers

How this checks out

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Reported by 2 independent outlets

A few outlets have it so far, short of the bar we set for confirmed.

Cited sources 2

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