Talking Heads: Little Creatures poll

i had no idea this won Pazz & Jop in 1985, that was a big surprise!

"Road to Nowhere" at least has a hint of "The Big Country". Other than that, after looking at this tracklisting again (and I listened to this dozens of times in high school), I'd be happy not hearing this again.

Stay Up Late is a great song. And She Was and Road to Nowhere are too, but going with my first instinct.

This album is awesome! Such a diverse discography, they have.
Great album cover, too:
http://radiovalentinletelier.cl/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/talking-heads-little-creatures-1985.jpg

voted for "stay up late," which besides affectionate evocation of bemused parenthood has a good breakdown and that out-of-left-field david ruffin moment.

this is a pretty great pop-rock album, i can't understand antipathy toward it. unless people either hate pop-rock or just don't think it's something talking heads should have sullied their hands with.

shouldn't have, i mean.

should have, i mean. (i got my negatives all criss-crossed.)

"And She Was" was a great little pop song, so I voted for that one.

i had no idea this won Pazz & Jop in 1985, that was a big surprise!

I didn't know that either. There were several great albums released that year, but this wasn't one of them.

Well done to Geir for picking out the great little pop song buried in all those 15 minute Prog epics.

'Stay Up Late' wins, and I haven't heard that for ages.

stay up late

"Road to Nowhere" easily. The rest of this album practically made me hate the band.

All I remember about this album is loving the singles and skipping over everything else.

i have an oddly vivid memory of hearing "and she was" (then brand new) blaring over the p.a. pre-show while lying on the lawn at an outdoor concert space waiting for graham parker to open for ... eric clapton, maybe? i don't remember for sure who the headliner was, but i totally remember hearing that song there.

(i think the reason i remember it is the "lying in the grass" line, while i was lying in the grass, whoa dude)

Road to Nowhere - best lyrical conceit on the record

LITTLE CREATURES being yo fave Talking Heads album is like Ball Cancer being yo fave death how much clearer cd I be?

― Straight from the Top of My Dom (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, April 14, 2009 10:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

so in this analogy death = talking heads albums. what is your point and why post in this thread? If I made a BEST CANCER TO DIE FROM poll on ILE and I picked ball cancer would you be like "baaawww what an IDIOT!! who picks ball cancer I mean clearly THE worst sugban!!"

also

I rilly like this album btw

― Straight from the Top of My Dom (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, April 14, 2009 10:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

my conclusion: you like ball cancer so you're an idiot

i probably think "Creatures of Love" is their best pop song they have ever done.

for The Beginning Of The End this is a great, great record

"And She Was" vs. "Creatures Of Love" with "The Lady Don't Mind" coming up fast on the outside. I kinda like that style.

I liked it a lot when it came out, being a Heads freak, but it's barely held up over the years. I wouldn't call it a bad album; there are some good pop songs, but they're far less interesting or unique pop songs than anything on the first 2 albums.

I disliked Speaking in Tongues from the start, yet I'm more likely to listen to that than Little Creatures nowadays. Speaking in Tongues = Interesting failure. Little Creatures = Boring success.

Voted "Road to Nowhere," which is kind of odd because I usually hate songs in march tempo.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I love this band to death, but have never really liked this album, as hard as I have tried. It's hurt so much by not really bad production but just really plain, boring production, which tends to bring the songs down with it. I mean, the songs aren't bad. It's just sort of ... there. I even listen to "Naked" a lot more.

naked is ok, but i think the songwriting on this one is a lot stronger. i even think the songwriting on true stories is better than naked. i sort of think naked gets overrated for having been somewhat a return to art-rock form after their two pop albums.

is Naked ever overrated? You get it right in your first sentence: it was a sign that the Heads could "expand" all over again, without being a totally successful album in its own right. Naked is one of the rare examplesin my canon of a perfectly good album whose quality fails to compensate for its redundancy.

Controversy: "(Nothing But) Flowers" >>> anything on "Little Creatures." Except maybe "Creatures of Love."

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Very reasonable.

This was the most Soto-esque of their albums, though, was it not?

haha -- you'll have to explain that one.

Controversy: "(Nothing But) Flowers" >>> anything on "Little Creatures." Except maybe "Creatures of Love."

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, 19 April 2009 02:13 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

You'll have to do better than that - "Nothing But Flowers" is one of my favourite TH songs on any album. I'll defend "Naked" and place it as high as any of their classic stuff really.

xpost

You're the ILM keeper of the mature, Apollonian, usually 1980s, well-produced, well-made song. This Talking Heads album dealt in such creatures more than any other.

entire album is worth it for the way he sings "from a bott-ull" on Stay Up Late.

Naked is my favourite Talking Heads album. I'm not so keen on Remain in Light, it sounds too 'whitey' and cold - I'd rather go listen to King Sunny Ade's stuff of the same period.
I also like David Byrne's solo stuff way more than the Heads'. his singing voice, songwriting, emotional power all developed further since the band's demise and no-one's ever pointing that out. I prefer davidbyrne and Feelings to anything Talking Heads released (except maybe for Naked).
I like Little Creatures. I'd have voted The Lady Don't Mind.

Stay up late!

max florian has some opinions up there
they're different, those opinions
i don't like it

Does "Stay Up Late" invent Black Francis?

He always seemed more the Gordon Gano type.

Ah, good call. More genuine (less performative) pathos in Gano though

picked up a copy of this recently, first album of theirs i've really given sustained multiple listens to! but tbh what i really wanted was a nice copy of Remain In Light, which i've heard a few times, and i think I'm unfairly holding it against Little Creatures that it doesn't sound more like that.

in particular, I'm missing the whole Fela Kuti/Brian Eno thing of those polyrhythmic layered-up arrangements where each person in the band is basically throwing down their own earwormy book continuously, producing so much momentum... here the band (mostly) feel like they're laying down an unobtrusive floor slab for Byrne's lyrics. right now only And She Was and Road to Nowhere (the ones i already knew) stand out, leaving a lot of hazy middle.

but some bits of some of the tunes are starting to pop up in my head, so i still think it could prove to be a grower...

"The Lady Don't Mind" and "Television Man."

Decidedly second-tier, though.

Yeah, it took me awhile to like this. It's kind of proof that their older approach to music can still yield great and more accessible results almost a decade later. I think it was the first Talking Heads album to go platinum too, so from that perspective it arguably showed how "ahead of their time" they were in terms of the pop mainstream. But that also means the album was breaking little if any new ground, so I'm a little reluctant to call it a truly great album. Still highly enjoyable, I remember throwing "And She Was" on to a class presentation once, only for like 10 seconds, and that was enough to get some people dancing.

Beneath the heartland arrangement, the ominous minor chords of "Give Me Back My Name" are the last departing wave of the Fear of Music era.

I don't really return to this album much, and "And She Was" is in some ways not that much like the TH singles that come before it -- I almost think of it as a one-hit wonder by a version of this band that only existed for this one album. But.... what a hit! The kind of perfect pop uplift people are so often trying to hit and missing. I love it eternally.

ftr "And She Was" is the Heads song I hear most in the wild.

I know this isn't a highly regarded Talking Heads album but just the same, still really like it. The two songs I still gravitate to most are "Stay Up Late" and "Little Creatures." I think KROQ who is most responsible for that.

Meant "Creatures of Love."

FWIW, I also dig the music videos.

Will maintain till I die: Creatures of Love >>>>> This Must Be the Place

Sounds like it if you've heard the demos. Funny how Frantz mentions it when Frantz is the Heads member most often credited with co-writes.

Apparently, Byrne always regarded the band as his. At one point, he "fired" the others.

xp Could be the squeaky wheel gets the grease, where someone else is likely to let it slide but Frantz is like "PUT MY NAME DOWN IN THE CREDITS!"

iirc in Frantz's book he frames their discussion abt songwriter credit as a moment when, not long after "learning how publishing works" (how long after? CF doesnt say) Byrne approached him about being the sole lyric writer bc he felt uncomfortable singing words he didnt write - not an unheard-of thing among singers ime, but in Frantz's telling Byrne is obv lying and it's a sinister deception in order to greedily capture publishing money. but idk listening to frantz's lyrics in the years since TH i cant say as i blame byrne.

nb: i've always taken Frantz's malevolent depictions of Byrne with a grain of salt, obv i'm sure he was not the worlds most chill collaborator but i've always assumed the truth is somewhere in between (espec since Byrne has historically held back from dishing dirt from his side.) I felt Frantz's book to be particularly cruel imho, especially if you look with modern eyes on Byrne in his youth as someone navigating neurodivergence/autism spectrum issues in an era when that was considered a punchline. Frantz makes sure to include seemingly every time someone said anything bad about Byrne, incl many stories about people mocking his body & appearance, which felt ott. lots of bits like "here were me and tina drinking and partying with such-and-such famous person, but then david embarrassed us by leaving without saying goodbye, what a weird asshole!"

like, not impossible for me to imagine a more sympathetic reading where byrne, as he grows more self confident, decides he doesnt need to keep accepting poetry tips from his pushy jock drummer

boy, "Perfect World" and "Walk It Down" are nothing songs, eh?

Still reeling from learning that the lyric is not "And she could see an earmuff factory."

And it should be any earmuffs factory, so you can get some thinking done in that dry ice factory over there.

*an earmuff*

I haven’t listened to this in forever, but I remember liking Walk it Down fine. Sounds like a True Stories song.

Perfect World is nowhere in my memory.

Perfect World is my favourite song on the album, talking of mishearing lyrics I thought for a time that Byrne was singing "I'm staring in your face, your photograph mind" rather than "you'll photograph mine"

My least favorite Talking Heads album.

OH THAT SONG! Yes, that’s a good song.

Television Man is my least favorite on this one.

Road to Nowhere is my fave.

My least favorite Talking Heads album.

― Josh in Chicago,

Less than True Stories?

i had no idea this won Pazz & Jop in 1985, that was a big surprise!

Christgau's essay suggests it was kind of a consensus default - like there was no one album that grabbed a broad spectrum of critics that particular year. I can see what he means - Hüsker Dü and Tom Waits had the best albums IMHO and so did the Replacements (though Tim could have been the best if it was better mixed and included two key outtakes) but they were all selling in pretty small numbers (Rain Dogs wouldn't go gold until 2013) and no album that sold only a few hundred thousand copies in 1985 was going to top P&J. That's not because critics cared about sales, but if it wasn't reaching that many people in general, I think that translated into reaching less voting members who would push it to the very top.

Also I actually like this album quite a bit! It's the "least" of their studio LP's at that point, but it's still an excellent one IMHO and closes out a classic run. The next and final two had enjoyable singles, but that was it.

At the time, I thought the band was trying to recreate itself in a kinder, gentler image. The album has aged pretty well, but I hardly ever listen to it. I would pick "Stay Up Late," just because it's hilarious.

"(Nothing But) Flowers" >>>>>>>> "And She Was"

otm

Less than True Stories?

Ha, I don't even count "True Stories." I'm not even sure I've *heard* "True Stories," which is strange, given this is one of my favorite bands of all time. But that's just how it is.

The film True Stories has its moments, e.g., the Spalding Gray monologue.

I have a fuzzy memory of local Chicago weekend show (I believe ABC7) covering how much various 85’ Super Bowl champ Chicago Bears players picked it amongst their faves for the year. Complete with montage footage - wish I could remember the particular song.

True Stories (album) is 80% great. "Hey Now" is the only one I'm really compelled to skip. It has more good songs than Little Creatures.

True Stories (album & movie) is Byrne going deep into the "Big Country" and coming out with an album about it. Once I realized Terry Allen was part of the project in some way, it unlocked for me. It's certainly not perfect; the different outfits that the Heads try on don't always fit so well, but it's more fun than the albums before and after.

John Goodman is excellent in it

boy, "Perfect World" and "Walk It Down" are nothing songs, eh?

Scott Miller, choosing his songs of 1985, writes of the latter:

The very catchy West African-sounding chorus requires that you sit through the verse, whose cookie-cutter '80s funk typifies the later Talking Heads who would never drift far from the primarily one-chord, slice-of-life success of "Once In a Lifetime". But I always enjoy listening to it,