David Byrne, frontman of Talking Heads, has announced his engagement to longtime partner Mala Gaonkar.
The iconic ‘80s rocker is keeping things low-key after he subtly revealed the big news during his interview with The Times.
The 73-year-old musician casually referred to Gaonkar as his “fiancée,” letting the happy news slip in a rare candid moment.
“My fiancée will sometimes come at me with greasy hands, ready to smear my face,” he said, adding, “And at one point I thought, ‘What if I wake up and really looked younger?’ But there’s a message, too. About how people judge us by the way we look. You learn a lesson you didn’t expect at the start.”
Despite their 18-year age gap, the pair have built a strong and lasting relationship over nearly a decade.
The “Psycho Killer” hitmaker first met Gaonkar in 2016 while working on a theater piece for The Makers series at Stanford Arts Institute.
The pair continued to work together in 2019 during their collaboration for the Theater of the Mind in Denver.
Before his relationship with Gaonkar, the ‘80s icon was married to artist and designer Adelle Lutz from 1987 to 2004. The former couple share a daughter, Malu Abeni Valentine Byrne.
As for his now fiancée, she was previously married to German financier Oliver Haarmann, who is dating actress Reese Witherspoon.
Who Is David Byrne’s Fiancée?
Byrne’s 55-year-old girlfriend is the founder of SurgoCap Partners, which she launched in 2022, as mentioned by Forbes.
Born in the United States and raised in Bengaluru, India, Gaonkar graduated from Harvard College in 1991 and earned her MBA from Harvard Business School in 1996.
Aside from business and non-profit activities, she also loves to write short stories during her spare time. Some of her works have appeared in Catamaran, Carolina Quarterly and American Short Fiction.
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