Talking Heads

I only play "Sand in the Vaseline" these days. The very early (1974) demo trax on there are excellent.

i can't believe 'more stories about buildings and food' really exists. it's perfect music.

Does anyone else find their music devoid of emotion?

What's this "emotion"?

i only listen to music with soul

they only have one love song and it's sung to a lamp

Don't know enough to comment, really, except to say that I would agree that "My Life In The Bush" is overrated. It has some cool sounds, and was "ahead of its time" in terms of sampling and so forth, but it just isn't very impressive these days. Flat sound, weak drums, for the most part. But again, no arguing the supposed "historical" importan

-- Mark Richardson, Wednesday, 21 February 2001 01:00

^^^Murdered by post-punk revisionist ninjas before he could finish his sentence.

They were one of the first bands I ever liked; and I am still fond of them. But how many good songs did they write? Maybe not many. Maybe they showed a way of being attractive without having good songs.

the pinefox, exasperation!#@035U05323E3555EESGTFGRAEWE!!!1

Tom was truly ahead of his time.

some of the most retarded things i have ever read in my entire life appear in this thread.

I don't think he shows on this thread that he was ahead of his time.

Some Talking Heads tracks that I like a lot include

Burning Down The House - always loved the edgy drums and keyboards on its long slow fade

Girlfriend Is Better - maybe I was just sucked in by Speaking In Tongues at that impressionable age

This Must Be The Place - I think this is quite wise, in a US-pragmatism sort of way: 'I'm just an animal looking for a home'

And She Was - and I think the video still looks good

Wild Wild Life - maybe just for contingent reasons

Memories Can't Wait - drama in its chorus

Found A Job - always liked this a lot, and the lyric is probably very prescient

Nothing But Flowers, and maybe more of Naked: jungle lushness, probably long underrated

-- but most of the early work, as for instance heard live on The Name of this Band is Talking Heads, doesn't do that much for me (though that record did revive 'Memories Can't Wait' for me)

I have to admit, my favourite Talking Heads list has the look of a fairly banal Talking Heads: The Hits collection. But that's not how I came to like those songs. I just did come to like them, more than the others I heard.

wtf, the name of this band is talking heads is unfuckingtouchable. the first half of the first disc is them at their tightest and the reason i prefer the '77 tracks on there to the album versions. when eno's producing for the next three it's a different story

and anyone who dismisses 'more stories...' out of hand is no friend of mine, uh figuratively speaking since we're talking about music you know

Memories Can't Wait - drama in its chorus

Almost everything on Fear Of Music is good. Having said that, I have almost no interest in hearing it or most any other Talking Heads song again. I have The Name Of This Band Is . . .; it was hard to track down at the time, and I was thrilled to get it. But these days I can't even get excited enough about the disc to load it onto my iPod.

what are peoples opinion on "look into the eyeball", byrne's recent album? its by no means his best thing ever but it's quite pretty and orchestral in places.

"Like Humans Do" is great - I find I end up loving about 1 song off all his later albums ("Miss America" and "Glass Concrete and Stone" being 2 from 2 more 'recent' full-lengths).

Frankly I just find it difficult to listen to Bryne at all anymore. Maybe in a few years I'll be able to come back and appreciate his recent stuff, but now just his voice makes me cringe.

Listening to SPEAKING IN TONGUES again on spotify, and wondering in what sense TH were 'intelligent' music, if such a thing has ever existed.

I just read my post about my favourite TH songs and thought, wow, that's still very accurate considering it dates from c.2002; then saw that it dated from a year ago.

Born Under Punches in the "09-Byrne tour" arrangement is really fucking great. Beautiful.

http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/live_in_rome_1980_the_talking_heads_concert_film_you_havent_seen.html

This is nice. With Adrian Belew

Plus Bernie Worrell,Dolette Mcdonald, Busta Jones and the others

whole lotta great/rare heads bootleg-type things over here: http://mywalloftapes.blogspot.com/

been knocking around for a while that Rome gig on You Tube etc, Belew on amazing form though aye. crazy they let him go although Alex Weir still does the biz on SMS.

From

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/06/the-talking-heads-song-that-explains-talking-heads.html

For younger listeners, and for older ones who never shared Lethem’s infatuation, Talking Heads live on principally in one track: the sad, sweet “love song” titled “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody).” When was the last time you heard “Burning Down The House,” the band’s biggest single? Probably not recently. But chances are good you’ve heard “This Must Be The Place” very recently, whether you knew it or not.
Thirty years old this year, the song has slowly but surely embedded itself in the American songbook. You can’t walk into a good bar between Williamsburg and Silver Lake without an even shot that it will come on the stereo in some iteration.

Good Lord, is this really true? It appears in a sizable proportion (but I think a minority) of POX lists here:

POX: Talking Heads

but doesn't appear to have anything like consensus top pick status.

Measuring purely on well-knownness, I would have thought that if people know one Talking Heads song it's "Psycho Killer," and if they know two they're "Psycho Killer" and "Once In a Lifetime," and if they know three they're "Psycho Killer" and "Once in a Lifetime" and either "Life During Wartime" or "Burning Down The House." but in any event not "This Must Be The Place."

once in a lifetime gets way more radio play

It's true that I've heard fans younger than me cite "This Must Be The Place" as their favorite Heads love song or The Best Love Song Ever. The correct answer is "Creatures of Love." Or "I'm Not in Love."

well that new yorker article is describing a subset of people. williamsburg and silver lake are not representative of most of america.

it sorta makes sense that it'd get hipster love, sorta a forefather to 'all my friends'

Byrne was the funkiest white man in pop until Flea showed up.

ok waht

I've always thought it was their best song fwiw

i was skeptical, but on Spotify, four of the top 10 most popular TH tracks are "This Must Be The Place" on various different albums -- the highest at #2 is from the Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps soundtrack

"This Must Be The Place" has been by far one of my favorite Heads songs since the first time i saw Stop Making Sense, though, so i don't really have a problem w/ that

four of the top 11, i should say

it's hard to isolate those numbers from its use in a big hollywood movie, like it's a good song but I'm sure if oliver stone used 'road to nowhere' I'm sure that'd be on top

thank you, New Yorker, for helping me imagine Anthony Kiedis singing "This Must Be The Place."

People who don't know who about Talking Heads, they know that song.

"Road to Nowhere" used prominently in Reality Bites and is even more of the moment in these fraught times than TMBTP but alas.

who

I've heard TMBTP at every wedding I've ever been to

was gonna say

I guess that's true, but Jakob could have changed *his* name, lol.

Pseudonym guys like Bono, Sting, et al., I assume by now they are legally both their birth names and invented names, right? Like, who do people make their checks out to?

jakob dylan: think it hurt his credibility, dunno about hurting his ability to get an album made initially. maybe.

I would have respected Jakob Zimmerman for sure

https://www.theonion.com/the-edge-still-introducing-self-as-such-1819567752

Other Dylan kids!

Jesse Dylan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Dylan (filmmaker, did the cover of Tom Waits' "Bone Machine"!)
Maria Dylan Himmelman (movie producer, married to Peter!)
Sam Dylan (photographer?)
Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan (once secret!)
Anna Dylan ("among the least visible")

when it comes to "psycho killer" covers the coneheads is my jam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to106Yj7MGU

and yes, i will rep for phish, _particularly_ their covers, since the songs they write tend to be cringe in the extreme (apparently they wrote a song that is called "gotta jibboo". that might be the best song in the world. i will never know.)

here's them playing "crosseyed and painless" for over half an hour in 2017. things of note:

1. crosseyed and painless is a much better song than, say, "tweezer"
2. they can, in fact, play "crosseyed and painless" extremely well, particularly consider they're a four-piece
3. i mean either you like jams or they don't. i personally do like their jams, and since they've spent decades developing a collective understanding of how to play with each other, they're perhaps the best there is at what they do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw6iltPJvBQ

you will be unsurprised to learn “gotta jiboo” is horrible, but is an excellent jam vehicle

I think they've done it a few times, the whole album? Here's one of them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upG2-48o1IQ

Looks like they have some extra players

Coneheads rule <3

A Stop Making Sense cover album is coming out soon
https://consequence.net/2024/01/paramore-a24-stop-making-sense-tribute/amp/

I wonder if there have ever been any covers of Talking Heads before

here's them playing "crosseyed and painless" for over half an hour in 2017. things of note:

Yeah, no. I'm open to lots of different kinds of things (really! stop laughing!) but jam bands, particularly Phish and the Disco Biscuits, are the hardest of hard nos. I shared office space with Relix magazine for almost four years and the things I heard in that time...I swear I could find a lawyer that would take my case.

I refuse to click on any of these Phish videos

It's OK, the'll still be playing if you ever get around to them.

I like this cover of Listening Wind by the Specials circa 2021 (rip Terry)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4bxtfjE0FY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oXIxXm3DyE

here's something orders of magnitude worse than phish's noodling

the phish full remain in light cover is quite strong, the separate 30-minute "crosseyed and painless" loses me pretty quickly though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhs2vVXEHwg

you will be unsurprised to learn “gotta jiboo” is horrible, but is an excellent jam vehicle

― ivy.

yeah one of the things i do like is this site called "phish just jams" that cuts out the song portions and just has them jamming.

and to be clear, i'm absolutely not saying "hey you have to listen to this sick jam". this is just music that a lot of people are _not going to like_. i don't think it's the best music ever, by any stretch of the imagination, but i do _like_ it.

i like phish in general. i mean if we're talking about privilege in music, i think their early years have some interesting stuff in them. ivy, do you know about richard wright, who wrote "halley's comet"? (he was going under a different name and pronouns when he wrote it.)

What the FUCK, Smashing Pumpkins. God damn this was so bad I couldn't stop watching it. Holy hell . Why take a song as rhythmically interesting and groovy as Once In A Lifetime and reduce it to absolute turgid slop. I've managed to avoid the Pumpkins for a long time since they were good, I had no idea it had gotten that bad. Shit.

that's a cover they were doing back in 2000 and have inexplicably revived more recently

how soon we forget Tom Jones + The Cardigans

I know I forgot that, if I ever knew about it

note to self if I see this thread on browser: check it the Delakota mix is still good

I know the discussion has moved on, but for the sake of pure hilarity, I feel obligated to share this geneaology doc some maniac made purporting to show that Tina Weymouth is a direct descendant of King Edward III.

https://humphrysfamilytree.com/Royal/Larson/Edw3-TinaWeymouth.pdf

I fact-checked it and it appears to to mess up in the 1400s; her ancestors include an English nobleman named Humphrey Stafford but not the same much more famous/powerful one in Edward III's lineage.

Anyway, I don't know if I'm more embarrassed that someone made this, that I found it, or that I spent 30 minutes at my job checking it's accuracy.

This of course says and proves nothing about her immediate family's power and financial status in the 20th century! I just thought it was funny to share--supports fgti's point about the scrutiny women artists face about their privilege. Or maybe just that geneology people are kind of nuts.

She’s bass royalty, isn’t that enough?

I like this cover, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2omdkdk2k

lol, dinnerboat otm

Talking Heads 1377

More Listening Wind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkwKRSxUfZw

Geoffrey Oryema

Not exactly a cover, but the version of Papa Legba sung by Pops Staples is better than the Byrne version.

Shawn Colvin's This Must Be the Place is a sentimental favorite of mine, because I am a softy. Sneaky woodwinds 2 minutes in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=486JJ6HaSyc

idk i'm still thinking a lot about privilege and art and marginalization, particularly with reference the part of david byrne's "how music works" on "how to create a scene", where he gives his perspective on the milieu that talking heads came out of

what i remember from it - and this is i think more than a decade ago that i read it - is that he talks about the rents being cheap and the place being undesirable. i think that's an important part of it! to me, though, i look at the larger history. in the early '60s there was the whole "inside llewyn davis" thing, you have hootenanies and woody guthrie is in a hospital there so some kid from minnesota comes by and hangs out there for a while and does really well and some other people do ok, phil ochs does ok until for a little while and then he does really badly for a little while and then he kills himself, dave van ronk does ok for a little while but mostly he winds up being locally renowned, the "mayor of mcdougal street", so when the cops go after a bar in his turf he goes out to defend the folks there, and winds up being arrested in the stonewall riots

because in the late 60s you have things like max's kansas city and you have warhol and his "superstars" and all of the people lou reed sings about in "walk on the wild side", and lou does ok for himself and the "superstars" and the women lou sings about wind up dead

i was jealous of the scene byrne described, when i read it as a struggling burnout weirdo in the midwest. i spent 20 years or so struggling to make it in the midwest. i was smart and i worked hard and then my dad died and left me $100,000 and i moved out to portland. and portland in a lot of ways reminds me of the kind of scene byrne describes. it's not _cheap_. i don't know how _cheap_ the east village actually was. out here there are a bunch of people talking about how "new portland sucks" and pining for the days when it was really cheap and not all gentrified like it is today

and i don't know what they're talking about really because i don't see portland as a super gentrified town. i see a couple big expensive hotels and chain restaurants and a bunch of grotty queer punks who are here because there aren't a bunch of other places who would have us, and i'm one of the relatively privileged ones.

which is i guess what brings me to godard college in vermont in the 1980s, which strikes me as a kind of privileged environment, this weirdo liberal arts college, and who winds up there are a bunch of the members of phish. and their drummer, you know, he gets up on stage and wearing a dress and sings old syd barrett songs while "playing" the vacuum cleaner, which is probably cringe but it's cringe in a way that i find pretty cool. sometimes you gotta embrace cringe. like, one of the people they're hanging out with is some 300 pound person who says they're a "lesbian transsexual" and goes by the name nancy butterbean something something i can't remember, which back then i think would probably be considered cringe by a lot of people. phish plays a couple of the songs this person wrote, and this person comes up on stage and sings sometimes, even though this person isn't necessarily a great singer. and eventually this person goes to see a psychic and the psychic says oh wait i see your problem, nancy is just the name of a lover you had in a past life, you're not actually a transsexual lesbian at all, and richard wright says ohhhh i see. and that's what some people would call "detransition" maybe, and i look at that and say so what if he's not actually a transsexual lesbian? it's cool that he got to be in an environment where he could figure that stuff out.

and of course phish wind up getting really famous which is the only reason i even know about him.

anyway i take my privilege and i move to portland and right now if you ask me i'll tell you i'm a transsexual lesbian.

like to me this isn't stuff that can be taken in _isolation_. out of the east village in the late 60s you had stonewall and you had david peel, and people know about one of those, and in san francisco in the late 60s you had the compton's cafeteria riot and the grateful dead, and people know about one of those.

i don't know what the fuck you have in portland today or what you're going to have in portland today. you have a city that's the "cheapest" on the west coast and you have queer refugees streaming in from all over the country but mostly from texas, mostly, and you have a bunch of incredibly brilliant, fucked up, desperate people in one place. and there's a lot of different art and music and writing that mostly people don't know about, _i_ don't know about it even though i live here, and maybe in six years you'll have a "scene". even if a lot of people here now say that it used to be better in the old days.

or maybe i'm wrong and portland is nothing like the east village used to be at all. fuck if i know. i've never even been to the east village.

For me one of the most revelatory bits in the Byrne book is the degree to which a space shapes the music (and vice versa).

You look at a medieval cathedral and you can see why Gregorian chant worked there; the long echo times and harmonic structure. A Viennese concert hall and see why Mozart worked there. The ovals of the balconies and resulting harmonic structure. And finally CBGB's - a long narrow hard-surfaced room, which makes sense (pun intended) if your music is spiky and trebly and tense and nervous.

You look at a medieval cathedral and you can see why Gregorian chant worked there; the long echo times and harmonic structure. A Viennese concert hall and see why Mozart worked there. The ovals of the balconies and resulting harmonic structure. And finally CBGB's - a long narrow hard-surfaced room, which makes sense (pun intended) if your music is spiky and trebly and tense and nervous.

― Washington Post Malone (Ye Mad Puffin)

i got that sense from byrne's book too, my family are foodies so i think of it as kind of _terroir_. i mean, in a broader sense, art is shaped by the material conditions under which it's made, and a lot of times those conditions can be invisible. or invisible in the present day! i mean shit, we're talking about mozart, we can talk about requiems, right? great classical art form, but it's a mass, and so there aren't a lot of pre-20th century requiems written by protestants (/me waves at johannes brahms)

i was jealous of the scene byrne described, when i read it as a struggling burnout weirdo in the midwest. i spent 20 years or so struggling to make it in the midwest.

the thing about the midwest, of course, is that david byrne wouldn't live there if you paid him to. no sirree.

idk. anybody here ever read the thomas m. disch novel _on wings of song_?

For me one of the most revelatory bits in the Byrne book is the degree to which a space shapes the music (and vice versa).

Eno said a similar thing in his diaries.

idk. anybody here ever read the thomas m. disch novel _on wings of song_?

Personal note: I spent the first half of my musical life basically doing Heads-esque music in CBGB-esque venues. It mostly worked.

The second half has been focused on acoustic music, and I've discovered that I can't always make it work in those same spaces. I failed spectacularly in a pub once. Once. And i haven't quite recovered.

Ages ago, yeah

― Al Green Explores Your Mind Gardens (James Redd and the Blecchs)

been a long time for me, too. disch is one of those guys who was a big creative influence on me, stuff like _334_ and "descending" and honestly, to me _on wings of song_ is one of the most depressing books i've read. from what i remember it's about someone who grew up in the fascist theocratic midwest who wants to be a fairy, and in the midwest that's the worst thing you can be, that's evil and satanic, and in new york, in new york it's different, but... this is my memory, maybe the book isn't like this... the people who've always been in a more open-minded environment don't necessarily really understand what it's like, to grow up wanting to be a fairy in an environment where fairies are the worst things imaginable. getting to be a fairy is great but basically everything else sucks. it's not a terribly optimistic book.

so anyway disch was raised catholic in des moines and moved to new york city when he was 17 and wrote a bunch of stuff and then his longtime boyfriend/partner died in 2005 and he completely lost his shit and spent a couple of years posting islamophobic shit on livejournal and then he shot himself.

i think "the big country" is kind of a shitty, ignorant song.

It surprises me when friends say they like it. It's long!

It does depend on how you read Byrne's vocal melody and how he sings it. He wouldn't live "there" if they paid him because he doesn't sound like anybody else "there."

xp solo drums would be a tough pub sell

It does depend on how you read Byrne's vocal melody and how he sings it. He wouldn't live "there" if they paid him because he doesn't sound like anybody else "there."

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

i looked it up and you're right. genius says this about the song:

In an interview with Marc Maron in 2015, however, David Byrne claimed that the song is a satire of popular culture’s image of him: i.e. as a snobby city kid. However, in reality, he says that he has a deep respect for the smaller parts of the U.S.

well, i _don't_ have a deep respect for the smaller parts of the US. i wouldn't fucking live in indiana if you paid me to! a lot of these places will fucking kill your soul. that's why i left the big country, that's why i came out here, because indiana was killing my soul and because i had $100,000 burning a hole in my pocket.

i don't blame byrne and frantz and weymouth for moving to manhattan when they graduated art school. i think it was a good thing that they did! talking heads are a great band and the east village was an important part of making them the band they were. a lot of people don't have that option, or have that option but it takes a hell of a toll on you, doing that.

it's... this is kind of the insidious thing, particularly in people who belong to "marked" communities. like yeah i've envied certain trans women. it's not helpful or productive to do that but i have. sometimes i've envied, like, abigail thorn, who's younger than me and brilliant and gorgeous and successful and _lives on god-damn TERF island, for christ's sake_, what's to _envy_ about that? it is completely _fucked_ that i'd feel that way about her. or that i'd envy, say, hannah baer, whose book is literally called _trans girl suicide museum_. i don't know if any of y'all have read that book, but goddamn, the idea that anybody on earth would envy hannah baer...

but people feel how they feel. there are no wrong feelings. the challenge is just to act, i guess, wise-mindedly while acknowledging those feelings.

idk. i guess that maybe gets a little far afield from talking heads, but it's just interesting to think about.

have i ever mentioned how personally relatable i find "seen and not seen"?

xxxxp Billy Corgan in that Smashing Pumpkins "Once in a Lifetime" looks like the guy in Robocop who drives into a vat of toxic waste and then stumbles out of his car and his face melts off, but just at the very second his face starts melting off

also v bad version of the song of course

I thought it was like Chris Elliot doing his impersonation of Marlon Brando, cribbing Byrne for the climax of Apocalypse Now

Dobly Atmos Spatial Audio!

https://x.com/highdefdiscnews/status/1753951689936126111?s=46&t=bJOqpCuQneT7ju08y55VSA

Hot off the presses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A73voVPhMfY-

that's...fine, though musically a note-for-note recreation

I've seen that one coming up a lot on "social" over the past few days (I guess just cuz Paramore are particularly popular)