Talking Heads

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Little Creatures
    Little Creatures
    Little Creatures

    David Byrne describes Little Creatures as a collection of “very conventional songs”, but compared to 1985’s biggest rock songs—“The Heat is On”, “The Power of Love”, “We Built This City”—it’s plenty weird. There were still new musical modes for the veteran band to explore: The Americana feel on “Creatures of Love” comes from Eric Weissberg’s steel guitar; “And She Was”, a bouncy tune about levitation, incorporates what singer Byrne calls a “white gospel choir”, as well as some unexpected power chords; and “Road to Nowhere”, which Byrne describes as “a resigned, even joyful look at doom”, features a Cajun-sounding accordion from Jimmy Macdonell of the NY zydeco band Loup Garou, plus another gospel chorus. The songs are conventional mostly in the sense that they’re about things: “Creatures of Love” celebrates sex, “Stay Up Late” celebrates babies in a daffy way (“Little pee-pee, little toes”) and “Television Man” celebrates television and the people who love it. “Something has been changed in my life,” Byrne mutters, as though in a trance, in “Give Me Back My Name”, as Tina Weymouth plucks a twitchy bass line. Throughout, Byrne emits a feeling of lyrical giddiness that almost makes it sound like a different band. It’s the simplest, clearest, least complicated Talking Heads album, partly because Chris Frantz’s resounding, bedrock snare and bass drum are mixed almost like a lead instrument. Rappers and younger American bands like R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü were now in the vanguard, and Talking Heads were happily in the autumn of their career.

  • Remain In Light
    Remain In Light
    Remain In Light

    100 Best Albums Talking Heads and their producer Brian Eno shared a love of African music, especially the work of Nigerian firebrand Fela Kuti, who built 15- to 20-minute songs out of repeated funk and jazz riffs. Fela was one of the strongest influences on Remain in Light, the fourth Talking Heads record, which is often ranked (justly!) as one of the greatest albums ever. There’d never been a prominent rock band that explored polyrhythms this thoroughly and ably. All four band members and Eno played multiple instruments on the album’s eight songs, and they also brought in percussionists, guitarist Adrian Belew (who’d recently played with David Bowie), the fantastic soul singer Nona Hendryx of Labelle, and avant-garde trumpeter Jon Hassell, who adds a tart melody line to “Houses in Motion”. Talking Heads albums are always conceptually sound, but they’re also physically satisfying, and the cross-current rhythms and musical hooks on Remain in Light give the album a kind of brute force. The band was also savvy enough by now to add small touches that rooted the music to pop traditions: a cowbell on “Crosseyed and Painless”, Hendryx’s prominent background vocal on “The Great Curve” and Tina Weymouth’s see-saw, six-note bass on “Once In a Lifetime.” Singer David Byrne’s interest in non-American cultures led him to the atmospheric song “Listening Wind”, which describes the stealthy actions of a man named Mojique, a bomber who targets the colonialist Americans who’ve begun living in his country. Where Mojique lives isn’t specified (there are hints of North Africa), and maybe that’s the point—there are many countries where Americans have made themselves unwelcome. Byrne wrote the song in the midst of the Iranian hostage crisis, which may have influenced him. The album describes terrorism and danger (and on the last song, “The Overload”, dread as well), but the overall mood of these thick, extended jams is ebullience, in the music as well as the lyrics. “The world moves on a woman’s hips,” Byrne whoops on “The Great Curve”, a celebration of sexuality and physical joy, in which the singer escapes from existential angst into a “world of light.”

  • More Songs About Buildings and Food
    More Songs About Buildings and Food
    More Songs About Buildings and Food

    On their second album, Talking Heads met their ideal musical match: the British producer and Roxy Music alum Brian Eno, who shared an art-school background with singer David Byrne, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz, and had recently worked on David Bowie’s album Low. There’s a denser, more foreboding sound on More Songs About Buildings and Food. (Here’s how the self-mocking title came about: Weymouth asked, “What are we gonna call an album that’s just about buildings and food?” And Frantz responded, “You call it More Songs About Buildings and Food.”) If all Eno had done was to add the thickening studio effects to Frantz’s hypnotic drums on “Warning Sign” and Weymouth’s sliding bass line on “With Our Love”, dayenu, he would’ve earned his keep. Byrne is at his inquisitive best in these songs, which portray him as someone puzzled by power dynamics, whether in relationships or at the office. “I’ve got to get to work now,” he sings in “With Our Love”, while “The Good Thing” goes even deeper into a hard-work ethos, with echoes of philosopher of selfishness Ayn Rand (“Add the will to the strength and it equals conviction”). “Work! Work!” Byrne chants at the end of the song, and by then it’s impossible to tell if he’s giving orders or complaining about them. The ends of the songs throughout, especially on “Found a Job” and “The Big Country”, are magnificent, with scrubbing guitars jumping between Frantz’s spare, purposeful drumming. An intense cover of Al Green’s “Take Me To the River” gave the band its first hit, with a peak of No. 26 on the pop chart. And in “The Big Country”, guitarist and keyboardist Jerry Harrison plays a loping slide-guitar lick while Byrne itemizes the humdrum sites he sees while on a flight over the middle of the country, and concludes with chilly disdain, “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.” It’s unclear whether he’s mocking or embracing East Coast snobbery, but either way, it’s the pinnacle of Byrne’s misanthropic phase.

  • Talking Heads: 77
    Talking Heads: 77
    Talking Heads: 77

    The grimy downtown club CBGB became the epicenter of New York punk and New Wave starting in 1974. The best-known bands on the scene were happy to credit their hip or cutting-edge influences: Tom Verlaine of Television loved free jazz and 1960s garage rock, Patti Smith named Keith Richards and Arthur Rimbaud as her role models, and everyone in the Ramones adored The Stooges. But Talking Heads stood out for their unironic adoration of KC and the Sunshine Band, Bohannon and other dance groups—a radical position, given how much CB’s patrons were opposed to disco. Talking Heads: 77, named for the year in which it was released, is an eager first step towards a confident, expert hybrid of musics. It includes perhaps their best-known song, “Psycho Killer”, which singer David Byrne started as a thought experiment—he wondered what it would be like to write a song in the style of Alice Cooper—that came to typify his writing style for a few years. “Psycho Killer” got a second life 40 years later when Selena Gomez interpolated Tina Weymouth’s bass line for her huge hit “Bad Liar”. “No Compassion”, which includes the chilling line, “They say compassion is a virtue, but I don’t have the time,” is an exercise in assuming an indifferent, even cruel, persona—and Byrne inhabits it convincingly. It shows “the rough side of our music,” guitarist and keyboardist Jerry Harrison says. There’s plenty of pleasure on the record too, especially in the interlocking strummed guitar lines played by Byrne and Harrison, which expand on what Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison had done in The Velvet Underground. Tony Bongiovi (a cousin of Jon Bon Jovi) and Lance Quinn co-produced the album; their previous collaborations included Gloria Gaynor’s disco standard “Never Can Say Goodbye”. But their work with Talking Heads was thin and sometimes even twee, a problem the band soon solved.

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About Talking Heads

In a promotional video for Talking Heads’ 1984 live album Stop Making Sense, an interviewer who looks suspiciously like David Byrne as an elderly man asks David Byrne how he can be a singer when his voice is so bad. Byrne, who is dressed in a giant suit, answers blankly: “The better the singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.” When the band started out in mid-'70s New York after meeting at the Rhode Island School of Design (Byrne, drummer Chris Frantz, bassist Tina Weymouth and, later, keyboardist Jerry Harrison), they seemed like the antithesis to the rebellion of punk: They were mild-mannered, neatly dressed, well-educated and soft-spoken (“Psycho Killer”, “The Big Country”). Weirdest of all, they made music you could dance to (“Found a Job”). But even as they got a little weirder (“Once in a Lifetime”, “And She Was”, “Burning Down the House”), they retained a primitive simplicity that not only rejected conventional rock excess but flew in the face of the ’60s myths of peace and liberation that punk helped dismantle. And for as playful it could be, their music maintained a baseline level of anxiety that hinted at rage and disillusionment without ever expressing it outright (“Crosseyed and Painless”, “Life During Wartime”). They made using your brain seem cool, and not mutually exclusive to using your hips or your heart. And as they branched into global sounds (“I Zimbra”, “Born Under Punches”, “[Nothing But] Flowers”), they furthered their general case that however arty and detached they came off, they were as human as we were—and there was nothing stranger you could be.

ORIGIN
New York, NY, United States
FORMED
1975
GENRE
Rock

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