David Byrne Has a New Book Coming. What a Surprise.

Someone at a literary agency has presumably signed a contract, received a sum of money, and then rung up David Byrne to tell him he is, once again, a published author. Byrne's new book—due this autumn, title withheld, subject undisclosed—was announced in the way these things tend to be announced: a brief item in the industry press, no fanfare, the publisher presumably waiting for Byrne himself to make a more spectacular entrance at some later date.

And what an entrance it will be, if history is any guide. Because if there is one musician-turned-writer who has earned the right to go on writing indefinitely, it is David Byrne. His How Music Works (2012) was not the usual rock autobiography—all tour buses, cocaine, and spiritual epiphany—but a genuinely strange, intellectually rigorous book about the relationship between architecture, culture, and sound. The kind of book Martin Amis might have written if he'd fronted Talking Heads. Actually, the kind of book no one else would have thought to write at all.

The announcement invites the obvious comparison to the long and generally undistinguished shelf of musicians who have also written books. There is a certain type of celebrity author whose book one can describe entirely from the cover: memoir, regret, redemption, a childhood described in present tense, a photograph of the author looking wistfully at a horizon. These books exist. They proliferate. They are placed near the front of bookshops in October and somewhere near the back by January.

Byrne is not that. He is the uncomfortable exception that makes the rule look worse. He has spent forty years being genuinely curious about things: urban cycling, performance art, design, neuroscience. Whatever the new book is, it will not be an exercise in branding. The announcement is characteristically tight-lipped, which is itself a form of communication. Other celebrities announce books with Instagram posts and countdown timers. Byrne apparently told someone, and the someone told Kirkus.

The autumn publishing calendar is already crowded. Big novels, important memoirs, the usual pre-Christmas sprint. Byrne's book will arrive without a title, possibly without a clear genre, certainly without a promotional tour involving a television host who has read the first chapter. It will sit there, quietly peculiar, demanding the reader do a little work.

Which is how good books tend to behave.