Milwaukee’s spring concert calendar added two very big shows Monday, with the Pabst Theater Group announcing that David Bryne and Rilo Kiley will come to town for separate performances at the beginning and end of May, respectively. Byrne is slated for May 3 at the Miller High Life Theater, while Rilo Kiley visits the Riverside Theater on May 28.
Byrne just finished the first leg of his “Who Is the Sky” tour in support of his new album of the same name and added Milwaukee among a group of other dates that’ll keep him busy as the weather warms up. He’ll get things started April 4 in Vancouver and wrap up May 17 in Baltimore, with a stop at Coachella along the way.
The former frontman of Talking Heads has been getting Who Is the Sky? into the ether in all sorts of ways since its release this past September. We’ve been spinning “Everybody Laughs” with regularity on 88Nine, and Byrne stopped by NPR’s Tiny Desk for a performance that got released last week.
Tickets for Byrne’s show at the Miller High Life Theatre on May 3 will go on sale to the general public at 10 a.m. this Friday, Dec. 12, with presales starting Tuesday. You can access those opportunities through AXS or visit the Pabst/Riverside box offices when the general sale gets underway.
RIlo Kiley are on a slightly different track, having put together a string of warmly received reunion shows that took them across North America earlier this year. After taking a breather from the road, they’ll do it again starting May 25 in Salt Lake City — the first of just four scheduled U.S. shows, which includes the Milwaukee stop.
The band fronted by Jenny Lewis hadn’t played live together in nearly two decades before hitting the stage in California this past May. The reunion tour was connected to the release of their career-spanning album, That’s How We Choose to Remember It, which came out just a couple days after that California gig.
Rilo Kiley will bring plenty of those songs to the Riverside Theater on May 28, and you can get tickets to the show starting at 10 a.m. this Friday, Dec. 12, online via AXS or at the Pabst/Riverside box offices.
Artist bios
David Byrne returns to the road with a brand-new live show in support of Who Is the Sky?, his first new album since 2018’s acclaimed and award-winning American Utopia. The new record is particularly cinematic, humorous and joyful — but often with a lesson baked in: that love is unexplainable and that enlightenment means very different things to different people. Most importantly, the songs evince Byrne’s gift for riding the razor's edge of avant-garde and accessible pop.
Rilo Kiley’s origins can be traced back to Los Angeles in the late 1990s, when Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett discovered a shared songwriting obsession and began performing together. After some starts and stops, a band was formed with Pierre “Duke” de Reeder playing bass. They called themselves Rilo Kiley, borrowing a name that came to Sennett in a dream.
Following a promising EP, Rilo Kiley got to work on their debut, 2001’s Take Offs and Landings. Self-recorded at home, the scrappy album offered a mix of Pacific Northwest-inspired indie rock and emo-adjacent angst, with a number of hushed and heartfelt tracks led by Sennett. They went on to release three more studio efforts, the last being 2007’s much-loved Under the Blacklight.
