By Jordan
My Year in Lists chronicles one blogger’s quest to understand why music matters to us and what makes it a lasting aspect of our existence. To facilitate this examination, three music fans have contributed a list of 52 essential albums. Each week this year, one album off of each list will be analyzed in an attempt to understand why some music sticks with us and what it means for our lives.
My Year in Lists: Interlude is an intermittent addendum to the feature that takes a step back from the quest to examine music from other perspectives.
Welcome to the first My Year in Lists: Interlude, a planned occasional respite from the quest at the center of the feature in which we will look at music in different ways. Sometimes this will involve asking the list contributors to sound off on a topic (as it does today) and sometimes it will involve me discussing an issue or an event that wouldn't fit into the feature proper (for example, look for an Interlude on the Coachella Music Festival in April). This week, I have asked the three list contributors, Tab, Collin, and Ashley, to discuss Talking Heads, why they consider the band essential, and why they selected the album they did for last week's installment of My Year in Lists. Without further ado, here they are:
Tab, on More Songs About Buildings and Food and Fear of Music:
I lived in a small town in Nebraska from 1977 to 1979. It was a cultural wasteland where the only conduit of music was classic rock FM radio and Rolling Stone magazine. Thank god for Saturday Night Live. It introduced me to two influential bands. DEVO was on in the winter of 1978 and Talking Heads were on in February of 1979. Both bands were great and were unlike the boring old rock and roll that I was exposed to at the time. Because both of these bands were on Warner Brothers labels I was able to buy their cassettes in a chain record store at the mall. In DEVO’s case it was Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVO! for the Talking Heads it was More Songs About Buildings And Food. Each of these records turned out to be very influential for me and represented a sea change compared to the boring old rock and roll of Boston, Styx, lame Springsteen, or the Cars. Both of the records were also produced by Brian Eno. I think that their second release More Songs About Buildings And Food and third release Fear Of Music are the best Talking Heads records. More Songs was unlike anything I was listening to and I still love the bass line on "Warning Sign" and everything about "Found A Job", one of the greatest songs ever. Fear Of Music is a darker more rhythmic album than its predecessor with "I Zimbra" representing the future sound of the band and "Cities" and "Life During Wartime" being other all-time favorites. Both records are great from first to last cuts and the records that were released after these, from Remain In Light on, were more collaborative efforts, eschewing lead singer David Byrne's creative vision and resulting in derivative sounding songs rather than the pure Talking Heads sound found on their second and third releases. When I was trapped in the bleakness of Nebraska, Talking heads were a beacon of light.
Collin on Remain in Light:
So once upon time in the early 1970’s a couple art-punks by the names of David Byrne and Chris Frantz met at the Rhode Island School of Design. What began as the two-piece outfit, The Artistics, soon evolved into the highly influential and infinitely enduring four-piece new wave band known as Talking Heads. Within a year or two the band would be performing their revolutionary combination of avant-garde, funk, and rock before The Ramones upon CBGB’s legendary stage. Very few musicians have experienced an evolution in artistic style over the course of a career like that of Talking Heads, who eventually incorporated elements from pop, ambient (thanks to Brian Eno), afrobeat and world music into their sound. Accordingly, no single album can capture their unique brand of music categorized as post-punk / new wave. Four albums probably aren’t enough, but they certainly bring us closer to identifying, comprehending, and appreciating (perhaps, even worshiping) the band’s vast and permanent contribution to popular music and American culture. I chose Remain in Light because, for one, I am a mainstream Talking Heads fan likewise embarking on a mission to consume and bask in their entire aesthetic; for two, it marks the beginning of the band’s longest studio hiatus (3 years); and, lastly, it represents the mid-point of their discography as their fourth effort, an effort that I believe to be their most experimental, wide-ranged and ground-breaking, especially in light of the new decade – a decade in which the term “new wave” would surface on MTV’s television screens and project from the mouths of their very own talking heads.
Ashley on Speaking in Tongues:
For this interlude, I’d like to talk about my favorite Talking Heads song, “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody).” A predictable choice perhaps, but sometimes the best is just the best. It’s not a sweeping tour-de-force on the level of “Once in a Lifetime” or as sonically experimental as many of the other tracks on Speaking in Tongues, but it’s one of the most emotionally resonant, nuanced songs in the Talking Heads’ catalog. Even Oliver Stone couldn’t ruin it for me by using it as frosting on the layer cake of mediocrity that was Wall Street and Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. The song has experienced a renaissance in the past few years as a go-to cover for bands like Arcade Fire and MGMT, and it even got the PS22 treatment.
For introduction’s sake, here’s one of the most sublime incarnations of the song, a live performance from Jonathan Demme’s brilliant concert film Stop Making Sense (1984):
I think “This Must Be the Place” sounds like a fairly straightforward love song, mostly due to its lilting (naive) melody and unusually warm vocals. There was a time when I wanted to dance to this song at my wedding, possibly with a man wearing an oversized white suit who would look into my eyes and say, “Out of all those kinds of people, you’ve got a face with a view.”
Unfortunately, as Byrne insists, he only writes about love with “reservations and twists,” and in this case, the twist is that "TMBTP" isn't much of a love song at all. The version that I think illustrates this idea most clearly is the music video for the cover by Miles Fisher, which contextualizes the song in the ultimate 80s satire, Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000):
Maybe it’s just because the words are coming out of Patrick Bateman’s mouth, but seeing this video was what convinced me once and for all that “This Must Be the Place” isn’t about being in love; it’s about someone else loving you, and struggling against your overwhelming ennui to return that affection. Byrne seems to be willing himself to feel something throughout the song - there are few sadder sentiments in rock music (or life) than “Home is where I want to be / But I guess I’m already there.” In fact, the entire first verse is downright tragic:
Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb, born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground, head in the sky
It's okay, I know nothing's wrong, nothing
Though obviously Byrne's lyrical point of view lacks Bateman's homicidal tendencies, Miles Fisher's elaborate music video works because both narrators are hollow; Bateman's insistence that he is "simply not there" isn't far off from Byrne's self-descriptors in that first verse. Yet based on the highly accurate and representative source that is the SongMeanings.net comments section, "TMBTP" is still generally regarded as the height of new wave romance. Commenter benfoldsfan insists "This must be what finding real love is like," while UNCWDMBfan says "I love the lyric, "Did I find you or you find me?" i think thats true love...i have no idea what this song means, but its great, what love should be about." A couple of people mention it as a wedding song. There are a few voices of reason throughout (the aptly-usernamed brokenfireescape notes "i think everyone's reading of this song is way off. this is one of the most depressing songs i've ever heard") but the majority seem to think of it as lyrically equivalent to "My Heart Will Go On." It reminds me of the public perception of "Hey Ya" by Outkast - a song about the futility of love and commitment, with a music video that prominently features a coffin, somehow becomes the feel-good hit of the decade.
Personally, I'm pretty content to have my favorite song be horrifically depressing. Besides, "This Must Be the Place" is successful because, not in spite of, the inherent contradictions and disparity between its lyrical content and listener perception. It's a Talking Heads "Choose Your Own Adventure" game, where one can emphasize the beautiful sentiment over the crushing doubt, or vice versa.
Read more My Year in Lists here
Showing posts with label Talking Heads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Talking Heads. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
My Year in Lists: Week Five
By Jordan
My Year in Lists chronicles one blogger’s quest to understand why music matters to us and what makes it a lasting aspect of our existence. To facilitate this examination, three music fans have contributed a list of 52 essential albums. Each week this year, one album off of each list will be analyzed in an attempt to understand why some music sticks with us and what it means for our lives.
“A friend found the name in the TV Guide, which explained the term used by TV Studios to describe a head-and-shoulder shot of a person talking as ‘all content, no action.’ It fit.”-Tina Weymouth, bass player
“We’re in a funny position. It wouldn’t please us to make music that’s impossible to listen to, but we don’t want to compromise for the sake of popularity.”-David Byrne, lead singer/songwriter.
“America’s most venturesome rock band.”- John Rockwell, The New York Times
“This ain’t no party. This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no foolin’ around.”-Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”
When I asked three of my most music savvy friends to create a list of essential albums for me to chart a course through, I wholly expected that there would be some overlap between the lists. I figured certain bands would show up on every list, and certain albums might appear more than once. I was right on this front (though often very wrong about what bands would show up multiple times or what albums would be chosen), and over the course of this year there are I believe three or four albums that appear on two or more lists (how I shall approach these shall be made clear in time). However there is only one band that appeared with a different album on each list. One band that each of my three expert compatriots deemed essential, and yet presented me with four different choices for the album they deemed most essential (Tab’s list included both More Songs About Buildings and Food and Fear of Music). One band to rule them all. Or, at least to get a full installment of My Year in Lists dedicated solely to them. And that band, in case you skipped the above quotes and are really only skimming this introductory paragraph for band names or sexual references, is Talking Heads.
Formed in New York City in 1974, Talking Heads combine elements of punk rock, avant-garde, pop, funk, international music and art rock to create a sound that is at once singular and vastly influential, entirely unique and endlessly aped by the 30 years of music that has followed them. In short, they are sort of the ideal band for this early point in the life of this feature. The band played their first gig as Talking Heads (after a brief stint as The Artistics) opening for The Ramones at CBGB on June 8, 1975. Their first album Talking Heads 77 did not sell well, nor did it produce a hit for the band.
I don’t think it’s being particularly bold to say that Americans fear change (except possibly for the type that we can believe in, which somehow makes us giddy). As a nation, we generally like things the way they are. Our Founding Fathers made sure to engrain this in our Constitution, and the majority of Americans think they got it right (some want things to stay the same more than others. Caution is one thing, but personally I’m a fan of things like electricity and equal rights. That could just be me though). It may be slightly bolder, though I venture no less correct, to claim that this is one of the reasons covers are so prevalent in American music. The cover can be seen as a testament to an artistic influence, sure, or as a band delivering their take on a classic. But looking at the amount of artists I have examined even so far in the short life of My Year in Lists, it seems that many artists also break into the mainstream by delivering a solid cover of a beloved song. To paraphrase Patton Oswalt, people like what they like, and they like it even more when you give it to them. This explains why the procedural flourishes on television (people like cops, doctors, and lawyers and are willing to watch them be cops, doctors, and lawyers weekly for decades on end), why remakes make hundreds of millions at the box office (people say to themselves, ‘Oh yeah. I liked Psycho. I should go see that new movie Psycho.’ NOTE: Do not, under any circumstances see the remake of Psycho. Consider yourself warned) and why, in part at least, there are so many covers floating around the music industry. All of these are partially explained by a dearth of creativity and by artistic bankruptcy, but Hollywood wouldn’t be able to get away with all of this if it wasn’t for Americans fearing change and loving to be reminded of the things they love, occasionally lovingly.
All of this is prelude to the fact that Talking Heads’ fortunes started to change, when they began collaborating with producer Brian Eno (formerly of Roxy Music, and also the producer of David Bowie’s famed Berlin Trilogy) on their second album, the aptly titled More Songs About Buildings and Food. The Talking Heads were almost definitely a band that changed the course of music and had a vast influence on what was to come. So it seems only appropriate that they broke into the mainstream and scored their first hit with a cover of Al Green’s “Take Me To The River,” which they performed on Saturday Night Live (another example of Americans fearing change and liking what they like, almost regardless of the show’s wildly uneven quality) in February of 1979. The album would go on to be ranked 382 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list, and is a stellar achievement on its own merits, but what got people listening was that song they’d heard a million times before, with a slightly different sound.
The album opens with the upbeat, pop-rock “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,” which allows for heavy bass and a guitar solo along with its catchy beat and lyrics. “With Our Love,” clearly a heavily Eno-influenced track, feels almost like a Berlin Trilogy Era Bowie song infused with lead singer/songwriter David Byrne’s distinctly punkish vocals. “The Good Thing” feels like a throwback pop track for most of its runtime, yet its chorus has a distinctly Talking heads refrain that feels like a modern interlude into a retro track.
“The Girls Want to Be With the Girls” harkens most toward the direction the band was headed in, using electronic sounds heavily and delivering the most fluid expression so far of Byrne’s whimsical, esoteric lyrical style. The album’s closing track, “The Big Country” plays with the album’s loose concept (made fairly obvious by the title), experimenting with a comparatively folksy, country influenced style, though the song never lapses fully into wither genre, remaining pretty firmly a rock-influenced ballad.
The band’s next effort, 1979’s Fear of Music tended more toward the darker side of post-punk rock. Fearing they would become viewed as a “singles machine” after “Take Me To The River,” the band wanted to expand on the subtle disco rhythms of More Songs About Buildings and Food and make them more prominent. However, the band found early recording sessions unsatisfactory and retreated from the studio into Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth’s loft (the two had been married since 1977), where they had rehearsed prior to being signed to a label. They called Brian Eno in to help them, and eventually recorded the entire album in the loft space. Rather than set the songs in contemporary situations as he had previously, Byrne decided to place the characters in his songs alone in dystopian landscapes. The album was titled Fear of Music because of the stress and pressure the band was under while recording it.
“I Zimbra” the album’s opening track adapts the Dadaist Hugo Ball poem “Gadji beri bimba” into a heavily African-influenced disco blend that also helped to set the stage for the band’s evolution. Keyboardist Jerry Harrison freely admitted the song’s heavy influence on what was to come, saying “we knew that our next album would be a further exploration of what we had begun in I Zimbra.” The song “Paper” somewhat sardonically compares a love affair to a sheet of paper, while “Cities” details the search for the ideal urban environment to live in. “Life During Wartime” is a jazzy comparison of New York at the end of the ‘70s to WWII era civilians, and argues against the view of New York in any period as a bohemian landscape. The song is included as one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll” and also became one of the biggest hits off of the album.
“Air” is a protest song against the atmosphere, written seriously by Byrne about a man so depressed that the idea of breathing troubles him. “Heaven,” my personal favorite song on the album, explores the idea of achievement and finding a purpose in life by identifying Heaven as the perfect victory over all of your personal goals. As such, Heaven in Byrne’s conception becomes a place where your perfect achievement, and the height of your celebration over that achievement will happen over and over again as exactly the same moment in the exact perfect way.
In 1980, Remain in Light found the band collaborating with Brian Eno once again. The band aimed for the album to dispel the notion that Talking Heads was effectively singer/songwriter David Byrne leading a backup band. The album experiments heavily with African polyrhythms, and at Eno’s suggestion recorded the instrumental tracks pre-vocals as a series of samples and loops, which had never been done before.
Widely considered the band’s magnum opus, Remain in Light originated out of the band taking time off to pursue personal interests. David Byrne worked with Brian Eno on an experimental album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Jerry Harrison produced an album for soul-singer Non Hendryx. Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth discussed the possibility of leaving the band (Weymouth believing that Byrne exercised too much control over the band’s direction), but instead took an extended Caribbean vacation, where they became involved in Haitian Voodoo and learned native percussion instruments. Rather than writing music to Byrne’s lyrics as the band had done before, the band performed instrumental jam sessions, using “I Zimbra” as a starting point. The band focused on a more collaborative process than ever before, experimenting with Afro beats and taking some inspiration from the beginnings of hip hop.
The lyrics for the album came last, a first for the band. Because of this, Byrne struggled with writer’s block and felt that anything he added to the instruments sounded stilted. As a result, he looked to Africa, as the band had for musical inspiration, and discovered that African musicians often improvised the words to their songs as they performed. What resulted is a free-association feel to many of the album’s tracks, composed mainly of stream of consciousness lyrics.
The album opener “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” borrows from preaching and ranting that Byrne had heard and read. “Crosseyed and Painless” is the most directly hip hop inspired track, borrowing the old school rap, “Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late.” Taking further inspiration from Africa, “The Great Curve” is built on a famous African phrase, “the world moves on a woman’s hips.”
The band’s most famous and enduring song, “Once in a Lifetime” has been named one of the 100 most important musical works of the 20th Century by NPR. The song examines the idea that people move through life with little awareness, rarely questioning what they do. The song examines an existential crisis and the inevitable sacrifice of youthful ideals for conventional success. Borrowing from the structure of evangelical diatribes, “Once in a Lifetime” exists as a prescient jab at the excesses of the 1980s. Remain in Light is widely considered Talking Heads magnum opus, and was ranked 126 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list.
The group’s next album, 1983’s Speaking in Tongues got its title from Byrne’s writing technique (debuted on Remain in Light but perfected during the recording of this album) of singing nonsense over the music the band had written and then making words fit to that. “Burning Down The House,” the album’s opening track became the band’s first and only American Top Ten hit, though the song found less success elsewhere (which is odd, considering Talking Heads had 14 Top Ten hits in the UK and several in Australia). “Girlfriend is Better” features the famous refrain “stop making sense” which became the title for the band’s concert film, directed by Jonathan Demme. “This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)” is a rare love song from the band. Byrne described it as, “[…] a love song made up almost completely of non sequiturs, phrases that may have strong emotional resonance but don’t have any narrative qualities. It’s a real honest kind of love song. I don’t think I’d ever done a real love song before. Mine always had a reservation or a twist.”
Talking Heads released three albums after Speaking in Tongues (1985’s Little Creatures, 1986’s True Stories, and 1988’s Naked) before going on hiatus and finally breaking up in 1991. The band cited increased musical divergence and “bad blood” as their reasons for splitting up, and Tina Weymouth has since commented that Byrne drove the band apart, calling him “incapable of returning friendship” and unloving to his fellow band mates. All rock bands, to some extent or another, end in tragedy, though, and prior to their inevitable demise, Talking Heads created some of the best, most influential music of the late ‘70s and early 80’s. The band has been cited as a huge influence on countless bands, perhaps most importantly on a little band you may have heard of called Radiohead, who took their name from the song “Radio Head” off True Stories. Ushered into the American consciousness with a cover that promised things would stay the same, Talking Heads changed the face of modern music forever. Things are not the same as it ever was. But would you really want them to be?
Read more My Year in Lists here
Look out next week for more on Talking Heads in the first My Year in Lists: Interlude in which each of the three list contributors to this feature talk about the band, why they think they’re essential, and why they chose the album they did.
Next on My Year in Lists:
John Coltrane gives us a Love Supreme, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band deliver something called Trout Mask Replica and we look into the self titled debut of Violent Femmes.
My Year in Lists chronicles one blogger’s quest to understand why music matters to us and what makes it a lasting aspect of our existence. To facilitate this examination, three music fans have contributed a list of 52 essential albums. Each week this year, one album off of each list will be analyzed in an attempt to understand why some music sticks with us and what it means for our lives.
“A friend found the name in the TV Guide, which explained the term used by TV Studios to describe a head-and-shoulder shot of a person talking as ‘all content, no action.’ It fit.”-Tina Weymouth, bass player
“We’re in a funny position. It wouldn’t please us to make music that’s impossible to listen to, but we don’t want to compromise for the sake of popularity.”-David Byrne, lead singer/songwriter.
“America’s most venturesome rock band.”- John Rockwell, The New York Times
“This ain’t no party. This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no foolin’ around.”-Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”
When I asked three of my most music savvy friends to create a list of essential albums for me to chart a course through, I wholly expected that there would be some overlap between the lists. I figured certain bands would show up on every list, and certain albums might appear more than once. I was right on this front (though often very wrong about what bands would show up multiple times or what albums would be chosen), and over the course of this year there are I believe three or four albums that appear on two or more lists (how I shall approach these shall be made clear in time). However there is only one band that appeared with a different album on each list. One band that each of my three expert compatriots deemed essential, and yet presented me with four different choices for the album they deemed most essential (Tab’s list included both More Songs About Buildings and Food and Fear of Music). One band to rule them all. Or, at least to get a full installment of My Year in Lists dedicated solely to them. And that band, in case you skipped the above quotes and are really only skimming this introductory paragraph for band names or sexual references, is Talking Heads.
Formed in New York City in 1974, Talking Heads combine elements of punk rock, avant-garde, pop, funk, international music and art rock to create a sound that is at once singular and vastly influential, entirely unique and endlessly aped by the 30 years of music that has followed them. In short, they are sort of the ideal band for this early point in the life of this feature. The band played their first gig as Talking Heads (after a brief stint as The Artistics) opening for The Ramones at CBGB on June 8, 1975. Their first album Talking Heads 77 did not sell well, nor did it produce a hit for the band.
I don’t think it’s being particularly bold to say that Americans fear change (except possibly for the type that we can believe in, which somehow makes us giddy). As a nation, we generally like things the way they are. Our Founding Fathers made sure to engrain this in our Constitution, and the majority of Americans think they got it right (some want things to stay the same more than others. Caution is one thing, but personally I’m a fan of things like electricity and equal rights. That could just be me though). It may be slightly bolder, though I venture no less correct, to claim that this is one of the reasons covers are so prevalent in American music. The cover can be seen as a testament to an artistic influence, sure, or as a band delivering their take on a classic. But looking at the amount of artists I have examined even so far in the short life of My Year in Lists, it seems that many artists also break into the mainstream by delivering a solid cover of a beloved song. To paraphrase Patton Oswalt, people like what they like, and they like it even more when you give it to them. This explains why the procedural flourishes on television (people like cops, doctors, and lawyers and are willing to watch them be cops, doctors, and lawyers weekly for decades on end), why remakes make hundreds of millions at the box office (people say to themselves, ‘Oh yeah. I liked Psycho. I should go see that new movie Psycho.’ NOTE: Do not, under any circumstances see the remake of Psycho. Consider yourself warned) and why, in part at least, there are so many covers floating around the music industry. All of these are partially explained by a dearth of creativity and by artistic bankruptcy, but Hollywood wouldn’t be able to get away with all of this if it wasn’t for Americans fearing change and loving to be reminded of the things they love, occasionally lovingly.
All of this is prelude to the fact that Talking Heads’ fortunes started to change, when they began collaborating with producer Brian Eno (formerly of Roxy Music, and also the producer of David Bowie’s famed Berlin Trilogy) on their second album, the aptly titled More Songs About Buildings and Food. The Talking Heads were almost definitely a band that changed the course of music and had a vast influence on what was to come. So it seems only appropriate that they broke into the mainstream and scored their first hit with a cover of Al Green’s “Take Me To The River,” which they performed on Saturday Night Live (another example of Americans fearing change and liking what they like, almost regardless of the show’s wildly uneven quality) in February of 1979. The album would go on to be ranked 382 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list, and is a stellar achievement on its own merits, but what got people listening was that song they’d heard a million times before, with a slightly different sound.
The album opens with the upbeat, pop-rock “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,” which allows for heavy bass and a guitar solo along with its catchy beat and lyrics. “With Our Love,” clearly a heavily Eno-influenced track, feels almost like a Berlin Trilogy Era Bowie song infused with lead singer/songwriter David Byrne’s distinctly punkish vocals. “The Good Thing” feels like a throwback pop track for most of its runtime, yet its chorus has a distinctly Talking heads refrain that feels like a modern interlude into a retro track.
“The Girls Want to Be With the Girls” harkens most toward the direction the band was headed in, using electronic sounds heavily and delivering the most fluid expression so far of Byrne’s whimsical, esoteric lyrical style. The album’s closing track, “The Big Country” plays with the album’s loose concept (made fairly obvious by the title), experimenting with a comparatively folksy, country influenced style, though the song never lapses fully into wither genre, remaining pretty firmly a rock-influenced ballad.
The band’s next effort, 1979’s Fear of Music tended more toward the darker side of post-punk rock. Fearing they would become viewed as a “singles machine” after “Take Me To The River,” the band wanted to expand on the subtle disco rhythms of More Songs About Buildings and Food and make them more prominent. However, the band found early recording sessions unsatisfactory and retreated from the studio into Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth’s loft (the two had been married since 1977), where they had rehearsed prior to being signed to a label. They called Brian Eno in to help them, and eventually recorded the entire album in the loft space. Rather than set the songs in contemporary situations as he had previously, Byrne decided to place the characters in his songs alone in dystopian landscapes. The album was titled Fear of Music because of the stress and pressure the band was under while recording it.
“I Zimbra” the album’s opening track adapts the Dadaist Hugo Ball poem “Gadji beri bimba” into a heavily African-influenced disco blend that also helped to set the stage for the band’s evolution. Keyboardist Jerry Harrison freely admitted the song’s heavy influence on what was to come, saying “we knew that our next album would be a further exploration of what we had begun in I Zimbra.” The song “Paper” somewhat sardonically compares a love affair to a sheet of paper, while “Cities” details the search for the ideal urban environment to live in. “Life During Wartime” is a jazzy comparison of New York at the end of the ‘70s to WWII era civilians, and argues against the view of New York in any period as a bohemian landscape. The song is included as one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll” and also became one of the biggest hits off of the album.
“Air” is a protest song against the atmosphere, written seriously by Byrne about a man so depressed that the idea of breathing troubles him. “Heaven,” my personal favorite song on the album, explores the idea of achievement and finding a purpose in life by identifying Heaven as the perfect victory over all of your personal goals. As such, Heaven in Byrne’s conception becomes a place where your perfect achievement, and the height of your celebration over that achievement will happen over and over again as exactly the same moment in the exact perfect way.
In 1980, Remain in Light found the band collaborating with Brian Eno once again. The band aimed for the album to dispel the notion that Talking Heads was effectively singer/songwriter David Byrne leading a backup band. The album experiments heavily with African polyrhythms, and at Eno’s suggestion recorded the instrumental tracks pre-vocals as a series of samples and loops, which had never been done before.
Widely considered the band’s magnum opus, Remain in Light originated out of the band taking time off to pursue personal interests. David Byrne worked with Brian Eno on an experimental album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Jerry Harrison produced an album for soul-singer Non Hendryx. Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth discussed the possibility of leaving the band (Weymouth believing that Byrne exercised too much control over the band’s direction), but instead took an extended Caribbean vacation, where they became involved in Haitian Voodoo and learned native percussion instruments. Rather than writing music to Byrne’s lyrics as the band had done before, the band performed instrumental jam sessions, using “I Zimbra” as a starting point. The band focused on a more collaborative process than ever before, experimenting with Afro beats and taking some inspiration from the beginnings of hip hop.
The lyrics for the album came last, a first for the band. Because of this, Byrne struggled with writer’s block and felt that anything he added to the instruments sounded stilted. As a result, he looked to Africa, as the band had for musical inspiration, and discovered that African musicians often improvised the words to their songs as they performed. What resulted is a free-association feel to many of the album’s tracks, composed mainly of stream of consciousness lyrics.
The album opener “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” borrows from preaching and ranting that Byrne had heard and read. “Crosseyed and Painless” is the most directly hip hop inspired track, borrowing the old school rap, “Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late.” Taking further inspiration from Africa, “The Great Curve” is built on a famous African phrase, “the world moves on a woman’s hips.”
The band’s most famous and enduring song, “Once in a Lifetime” has been named one of the 100 most important musical works of the 20th Century by NPR. The song examines the idea that people move through life with little awareness, rarely questioning what they do. The song examines an existential crisis and the inevitable sacrifice of youthful ideals for conventional success. Borrowing from the structure of evangelical diatribes, “Once in a Lifetime” exists as a prescient jab at the excesses of the 1980s. Remain in Light is widely considered Talking Heads magnum opus, and was ranked 126 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list.
The group’s next album, 1983’s Speaking in Tongues got its title from Byrne’s writing technique (debuted on Remain in Light but perfected during the recording of this album) of singing nonsense over the music the band had written and then making words fit to that. “Burning Down The House,” the album’s opening track became the band’s first and only American Top Ten hit, though the song found less success elsewhere (which is odd, considering Talking Heads had 14 Top Ten hits in the UK and several in Australia). “Girlfriend is Better” features the famous refrain “stop making sense” which became the title for the band’s concert film, directed by Jonathan Demme. “This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)” is a rare love song from the band. Byrne described it as, “[…] a love song made up almost completely of non sequiturs, phrases that may have strong emotional resonance but don’t have any narrative qualities. It’s a real honest kind of love song. I don’t think I’d ever done a real love song before. Mine always had a reservation or a twist.”
Talking Heads released three albums after Speaking in Tongues (1985’s Little Creatures, 1986’s True Stories, and 1988’s Naked) before going on hiatus and finally breaking up in 1991. The band cited increased musical divergence and “bad blood” as their reasons for splitting up, and Tina Weymouth has since commented that Byrne drove the band apart, calling him “incapable of returning friendship” and unloving to his fellow band mates. All rock bands, to some extent or another, end in tragedy, though, and prior to their inevitable demise, Talking Heads created some of the best, most influential music of the late ‘70s and early 80’s. The band has been cited as a huge influence on countless bands, perhaps most importantly on a little band you may have heard of called Radiohead, who took their name from the song “Radio Head” off True Stories. Ushered into the American consciousness with a cover that promised things would stay the same, Talking Heads changed the face of modern music forever. Things are not the same as it ever was. But would you really want them to be?
Read more My Year in Lists here
Look out next week for more on Talking Heads in the first My Year in Lists: Interlude in which each of the three list contributors to this feature talk about the band, why they think they’re essential, and why they chose the album they did.
Next on My Year in Lists:
John Coltrane gives us a Love Supreme, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band deliver something called Trout Mask Replica and we look into the self titled debut of Violent Femmes.
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