ONCE IN A LIFETIME

Talking Heads Star, 73, Engaged to Businesswoman, 55

David Byrne revealed that he is engaged to Mala Gaonkar in a recent interview.

One of America’s most beloved new wave rockers is tying the knot again. David Byrne, who led Talking Heads from its founding to the band’s split in 1991, told The Times that he is engaged to Mala Gaonkar in an interview published on Saturday. The 55-year-old Gaonkar is a former hedge fund manager and philanthropist who has invested in companies such as Nvidia and Figma. Byrne told The Times that Gaonkar was the inspiration for Moisturizing Thing, one of the songs on his new solo album. “My fiancée will sometimes come at me with greasy hands, ready to smear my face,” he said. “And at one point I thought, ‘What if I wake up and really looked younger?‘” It’s not the first time Byrne’s art has been bolstered by his relationship with Gaonkar, which began more than a decade after his 2004 divorce from costume designer Adelle Lutz. The two collaborated on an immersive theater performance in 2022 entitled Theater in the Mind, an ambitious project involving fake grass and virtual reality headsets. Each room of the experience represented a stage of Byrne’s life, one that has cast him in the role of rock star, filmmaker, author—and now a soon-to-be-married man.