When Byrne was eight or nine years old they moved to Arbutus, Maryland, in the United States, where his father worked as an electronics engineer at Westinghouse Electric Corporation and his mother later became a teacher.

After Byrne and Frantz were unable to find a bass guitar player in New York for nearly two years, Weymouth learned to play the instrument.

In 2002, Talking Heads was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where they reunited to play three tracks, including "Psycho Killer" and "Burning Down the House".

[12] During his time in the band, David Byrne took on outside projects, collaborating with Brian Eno during 1979 and 1981 on the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which attracted considerable critical acclaim due to its early use of analogue sampling and found sounds.

In keeping with the spirit of the original album, stems for two of the songs' component tracks were released under Creative Commons licenses and a remix contest website was launched.

Rei Momo (1989) was the first solo album by Byrne after leaving Talking Heads, and features mainly Afro-Cuban, Afro-Hispanic, and Brazilian song styles, including popular dances such as merengue, son cubano, samba, mambo, cumbia, cha-cha-chá, bomba and charanga.

His third solo album, Uh-Oh (1992), featured a brass section and was driven by tracks such as "Girls on My Mind" and "The Cowboy Mambo (Hey Lookit Me Now)".

Grown Backwards (2004), released by Nonesuch Records, used orchestral string arrangements, and includes two operatic arias as well as a rework of X-Press 2 collaboration "Lazy".

[17] The subsequent tour – which showcased songs from American Utopia alongside highlights from his Talking Heads and solo career to date – was described by NME as being perhaps "the most ambitious and impressive live show of all time", blurring the lines "between gig and theatre, poetry and dance".

[18] In 1981, Byrne partnered with choreographer Twyla Tharp, scoring music he wrote that appeared on his album The Catherine Wheel for a ballet with the same name, prominently featuring unusual rhythms and lyrics.

Byrne wrote the Dirty Dozen Brass Band-inspired score Music for "The Knee Plays", released in 1985, for Robert Wilson's vast five-act opera The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down.

He worked with Robert Wilson on "The Knee Plays" and "The Forest", and invited Spalding Gray (of The Wooster Group) to act in True Stories, while Meredith Monk provided a portion of the film's soundtrack.

Byrne also provided a soundtrack for JoAnne Akalaitis' film Dead End Kids (1986), made after a Mabou Mines theatre production.

His work has been extensively used in film soundtracks, most notably in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su on Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987), which won an Academy Award for Best Original Score.

The Forestry Maxi-single contained dance and industrial remixes of pieces from The Forest by Jack Dangers, Rudy Tambala, and Anthony Capel.

In Spite of Wishing and Wanting is a soundscape Byrne produced in 1999 for Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus's dance company Ultima Vez.

In late 2005, Byrne and Fatboy Slim began work on Here Lies Love, a disco opera or song cycle about the life of Imelda Marcos, the controversial former First Lady of the Philippines.

Byrne performed "Once in a Lifetime" and "Toe Jam" with the cast of the Broadway show American Utopia and appears in the "Airport Sushi" sketch singing a parody of "Road to Nowhere".

[31] Byrne worked with Latin superstar Selena in March 1995; writing, producing and singing a bilingual duet titled "God's Child (Baila Conmigo)".

In September 2004, Byrne co-authored a CD collection and performed with Gilberto Gil at a benefit concert promoting the Creative Commons license.

In 2007, he provided a cover of the Fiery Furnaces' song "Ex-Guru" for a compilation to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the founding of Thrill Jockey, a Chicago-based record label.

[35] Later that year, Byrne and his production team turned the Battery Maritime Building, a 99-year-old ferry terminal in Manhattan, into a playable musical instrument.

He also was a signator of a letter protesting the decision of the Toronto International Film Festival to choose Tel Aviv as the subject of its inaugural City-to-City Spotlight strand.

[40] In May 2011, Byrne contributed backing vocals to the Arcade Fire track "Speaking in Tongues" which appeared on the deluxe edition of their 2010 album The Suburbs.

In March 2013, he debuted a fully staged production of his 2010 concept album Here Lies Love at New York's Public Theater, directed by Tony Award-nominee Alex Timbers following its premiere at MoCA earlier in the year.

That same month, he and Sakamoto released a re-recording of their 1994 collaboration "Psychedelic Afternoon" to raise money and awareness for children impacted by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

It was originally created to release Latin American compilations, but it has grown to include music from Cuba, Africa, the Far East and beyond, releasing the work of artists such as Cornershop, Os Mutantes, Los De Abajo, Jim White, Zap Mama, Tom Zé, Los Amigos Invisibles, and King Changó.

He serves on the board of directors of SoundExchange, an organisation designated by the United States Congress to collect and distribute digital performance royalties for sound recordings.

[59][60] Later in October 2010, he performed a hit from Talking Heads' 1988 album Naked titled "(Nothing But) Flowers" along with Thomas Dolby and string quartet Ethel-the TED2010 house band.

In 2008, Byrne designed a series of bicycle parking racks in the form of image outlines corresponding to the areas in which they were located, such as a dollar sign for Wall Street and an electric guitar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.