The singer-songwriter and Talking Heads frontman presents some of his favorite holiday music — including songs by The Pogues, James Brown, LCD Soundsystem and Paul Simon. Find his playlist on Apple Music and Spotify. Also, our film critic Justin Chang shares his list of the best movies of 2024.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. It's becoming a Fresh Air tradition that for Christmas, we ask someone who's deep into music and whose work we love to choose some of their favorite Christmas recordings. We started this two years ago with Questlove. Yesterday, we featured John Batiste at the piano, singing and playing some Christmas songs.
Today, we feature David Byrne and his Christmas playlist, which we recorded last Christmas. Byrne is, of course, a founder and the frontman of Talking Heads, which was a seminal new wave band in the 70s and 80s, although calling the band new wave and punk doesn't describe how unique they were or how they expanded out from the stripped-down music they began playing.
Byrne also founded the music label Luwakabop, which releases music of different genres from the U.S. and around the world. The restored version of the Talking Heads' 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense was released last year. It's widely considered one of the best concert films. Byrne also created the Broadway shows American Utopia and Here Lies Love. David Byrne, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Happy holidays. Happy holidays.
Good to be back.
So I want to start by asking you, what are the criteria that you use to compile this list?
I wanted to not take it too seriously, not too seriously, the Christmas list, and have fun. So when I'm putting together these kind of playlists for friends or whatever, I'm thinking, I want them to just have fun. Let's give them something that will bring a little joy. And the holidays, because the holidays can be stressful for a lot of people.
Yeah, and we've got some songs about that, too, that you've chosen.
Yeah, we have that, too. We do have that.
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