Songfacts®:

• This song finds David Byrne imagining a weary, very human Buddha at a modern cocktail party. He uses him as a vehicle to talk about doubt, burnout and the absurdity of looking for someone else to have all the answers.
• Byrne's closing lines cheerfully lower enlightenment from a mountaintop to a buffet table.
  
  Well, all of this suffering's
  Just a temporary thing
  Right here is nirvana
  Where the little crawdads sing
  
  It's spirituality by way of finger food, less sacred temple, more "please move, you're blocking the dip." The idea echoes pop's long fascination with Buddha as both sage and cultural cameo, from Donovan's blissed-out mysticism in "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" to the Beatles' India-era soul-searching that hovered around songs like "Across The Universe." Byrne's version, however, is less transcendental retreat and more existential mingling.
• Byrne recorded "Buddha" for his ninth solo album, Who Is the Sky? He tapped producer Kid Harpoon (known for his work for Harry Styles and Miley Cyrus) for the album, but their meeting was unusually roundabout. Byrne first encountered Harpoon's work through artists he admired, like Maggie Rogers, and personally reached out to check references. He eventually crossed paths with the producer not in a studio but at a birthday party in Los Angeles, where Byrne shared demos. Kid Harpoon loved them enough to jump onboard.
• Who Is the Sky? is a collaborative album with the New York City-based musical ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra, led by Brian Carpenter. Byrne was drawn to them after hearing their Moondog tribute album and attending one of their New York performances. He later sent Carpenter demos, and over several months Ghost Train Orchestra members helped arrange the songs into lush orchestral pieces, giving Who Is the Sky? a distinctive brass-and-reeds palette.
• "Buddha" stands out as one of the album's most overt story-driven and philosophical tracks, pairing playful narrative with meditations on suffering and enlightenment. Byrne explained to Mojo magazine how his songwriting begins in one of two ways:
  
  "Firstly a wordless melody, a scat thing, then put that over a loop with some chords."
  
  That becomes his demo, for which he then writes some words that fit. "Those songs tend to be more groove orientated," he said.
  
  Other times, inspiration begins with a title. "I'll be talking to someone or thinking to myself, like 'I Met The Buddha at a Downtown Party.' There's a story there. What happens next? and what happens after that? I fill out pages with all the possibilities, the phrases he might say, what you might say back to him."
• The Who Is the Sky? title was a happy accident courtesy of voice-to-text. A friend intended to write, "Who is this guy?" but Byrne's phone converted it into something much stranger and more poetic. It was the perfect title. "Anybody who says it knows what it might have been originally," Byrne told Jimmy Fallon. "And I thought, OK, that's it. Search no more."