Everybody's Coming To My House

Album: American Utopia (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • Many of David Byrne's songs reflect his social anxiety though exaggerated characters. His big fear in this one is something anyone who dreads a party can understand:

    Everybody's coming to my house
    And they're never gonna go back home
  • David Byrne wrote this epic, groove-laden track with Brian Eno. The English musician and producer also contributed "robot rhythm guitar" to the song.

    Eno and Byrne are frequent collaborators and have released two joint albums: 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and 2008's Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.
  • When "Everybody's Coming to My House," reached the top tier of Billboard's Triple A chart, it became Byrne's first song - with or without Talking Heads - to reach the Top 10 of any airplay list since 1992.
  • Released in January 2018, "Everybody's Coming to My House" is the lead single from the album American Utopia, which was issued two months later. In the world of David Byrne, albums can be jumping off points for other projects; in 2019, he used the songs and concept to create the stage play American Utopia, which ran on Broadway from October 2019 to February 2020. The play, which stars Byrne and incorporates Talking Heads songs along with the American Utopia tracks, but turned into a film, directed by Spike Lee, released on HBO on October 17, 2020.
  • The music video is a collaboration between David Byrne and students from the Detroit School of Arts, with the entire song performed by the school's vocal jazz ensemble. In the stage production of American Utopia, Byrne explains that when he heard their version, he was gobsmacked; they used the same lyrics and melody, but changed the meaning, making the guy in the song sound like he really is happy to have everybody come over. "I realized it was about inclusion, welcoming and not being alone," Byrne explained.

    Justin Malone-Horton of the Detroit School of the Arts' Vocal Jazz ensemble admitted that when he and his fellow students first heard the song, "Half of us were like, 'This song is OK,' then a quarter of us were like, 'Oh My Gosh! Who did this?' Then, when we actually read the sheet music and did it, it just felt like a moment of togetherness."
  • Byrne performed this song with Miley Cyrus to ring in 2023 on Miley's New Year's Eve Party. The pair also did a cover of David Bowie's "Let's Dance." Cyrus joined Byrne in his unorthodox dance style during the performance.

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