David Byrne Joins Stephen Colbert’s Final Week, Plays “Burning Down the House”

As The Late Show ticks toward its May 21 finale, David Byrne appeared as one of the final musical guests, performing “Burning Down the House” with his Why Is The Sky? band. They all wore matching blue suits. Stephen Colbert, in the same outfit, walked on to join them, flames flickering across the screen behind the stage. The whole thing felt less like routine late-night booking and more like a deliberate closing gesture.

The context isn’t subtle. CBS canceled the show in July 2025, calling the move purely financial. But the decision landed after years of Donald Trump’s public tirades against Colbert, and shortly after Paramount, the network’s parent company, reached a $16 million settlement with Trump over the editing of a 60 Minutes segment. That settlement arrived while a Paramount-Skydance Media merger awaited FCC approval, leaving a faint political mark on the cancellation’s timeline.

Byrne carried a different energy. He was on the show in March, performing “When We Are Singing” and discussing his album Who Is the Sky? He told Colbert he’d shifted his stage palette. “The last one was grey,” he said. “I thought, ‘No, the times we live in, we need some color