From his groundbreaking work with avant new wave/post punk band the Talking Heads in the ’80s to more recent experimental works such as his New York art installation that allows one to play the pipes of a building like a musical instrument, David Byrne has always straddled the mainstream and fringe outskirts of the art world. This weekend he not only performs at Bonnaroo, bringing elements of his over-the-top spectacle of a tour from last summer to an even larger audience, but he has also been chosen to curate an entire stage of acts at the festival (an honor not previously bestowed upon any artist).

As music fans descend upon rural Tennessee for the show, Byrne took some time to discuss his performance and the process of choosing bands for his curated stage.

Bonnaroo is often considered the best summer music festival around. As someone who has played many festivals of this kind, what are your thoughts on that from a performer’s perspective?
 
Well, see I only played there once.  But I’ve noticed that in the programming and in the lineup organization that they just kind of widened their scope.  It used to be known as the jam band festival some years ago.  And it was for a while [and] seemed like it was limiting itself to that kind of thing. But it seems to have widened itself out a lot since then. And it kind of brought the audience with it, or vice versa.  It’s hard to tell who is leading who.  But it has a much wider musical scope now than it used to, and I think [it will be able] to push it quite a bit further in years to come. 
 
When the festival organizers decided to make you a stage curator, did they give you autonomy when it came to choosing the artists, or did you have to kind of choose from any sort of preapproved list or anything like that? 
 
Well, I kind of self-imposed a little bit of restrictions.  I mean, I said, “I want to pick acts that I’ve actually seen perform.  I’m not going to pick something that I think is not going to work.”  By work I mean there might be somebody’s recording that’s musically great, but I just might think, “You know outdoors on a hot summer night or late afternoon in Tennessee, sometimes the music is just not going to work, as much as you might love it.”   So I kind of edited it myself and said, “No I’m going to try and think of what kinds of things would work in that venue at that time of the year, in that place that. I also was limited by things that I’d already seen, which kind of limits me quite a bit, actually.

With Bonnaroo being known not just as a music festival, but also as a multimedia art festival with on-site installations and whatnot, I was curious if you had given any thought to doing any sort of art installations at Bonnaroo like the one you did in New York.

No, I haven’t because I am in the middle of a tour.  I basically pass through Bonnaroo as part of my tour, and then I move on to Texas.  So there is no way I could put together something like that, because those kinds of installations take weeks to put together. 

The show you’ve been doing for recent tours is very intricate with a lot of subtleties and such. What are you planning for your performance at Bonnaroo and what are the challenges of putting that show on a big stage in front of such a large audience?

I’ll be doing a version of that show.  It has kind of been evolving over the year, and also when you do it for a festival crowd, you might edit it a bit.  Maybe take out a few of the ballads, because for a festival crowd people’s attention can kind of waver if you do too many mid-tempo songs in a row, at least it seems that way to me.   

The show I’ve been doing has a lot of visual stuff going on.  There’s dancers and there’s three singers that join the dancers and that jump around, and I join them sometimes, so there’s a lot going on stage for people to look at, if they can see it. 

Time permitting, are there any other acts you plan on trying to catch over the weekend?

There are quite a few, but I haven’t checked all the schedules.  I am not going to be there for the whole festival, but I will get to be around for the whole day.  So unless it’s muddy, I will probably bike around and catch quite a number of the other acts. 
 
I’ve kind of made notes – there are a lot of acts that I’ve already seen, here and there.  But I have never seen TV on the Radio live.  I have never seen the Yeah Yeah Yeahs live or MGMT. They’re all like hometown people, so you’d think I would have seen them, but I haven’t.   

Jenny Lewis, I saw live a couple of years ago, and it was just amazing.  So I’d be curious to see her again.  Grizzly Bear another hometown act that I haven’t seen live, but would like to see them.  Neko Case – I saw her few years ago, but it was great, and her new record is really nice, so I’d like to see that.   

There’s probably a bunch of others, but I’ll have to see what’s around, when I’m there.