Best known to many as the frontman of new wave band Talking Heads, David Byrne continues to take on surprising new projects that challenge himself and his audiences.

Among those is Reasons to be Cheerful, an online magazine that Byrne launched in 2019, to share stories about what’s going right in our troubled times – and the people making it happen.

In this interview, Byrne opens up about the power of those positive stories.

“I realized that waking up every morning and reading the paper, and reading all this negative stuff and getting myself all balled up and angsty and everything about it, was not good for my health,” he told Imagine5. So he set about creating the “antidote”.

“We tend to think that we’re too small to affect any kind of change, but these people prove us wrong. It sometimes only takes a handful to do something.”