Talking Heads • Track by Track

Under the cut you find the complete Talking Heads discography, the songs are organized chronologically by studio album. First, you’ll find the original tracklist, followed by the singles, songs that were performed live at the time, outtakes and/or demos. Click on a song to learn more about it in a separate post! (Obviously this list will be updated with links every time there's a new post) We post a new song every Monday.

Have an interesting TH song fact yourself? Submit it here. Curious about a song? Leave us a question, and we’ll try to dig up some info for you and move the song up in the queue!

Filter by tag: Talking Heads: 77 • More Songs About Buildings And Food • Fear Of Music • Remain In Light • Speaking In Tongues • Little Creatures • True Stories • Naked • Album Posts • Singles • Demos • Miscellaneous (songs that have never been officially released) • Music Videos • What The Songs Look Like (book with visual interpretations of Talking Heads songs, published in 1987) • Audio

Ninth track (B3) on Fear Of Music (1979).

DB: "It used to be called Animals, now I think it's going to be called Think." [Australian Triple R Interview, June 1979]

TW: "On 'Animals' all of us had to fit our parts to David's part. It starts out in 5/4 time, then into 7/4 time, then back into 5/4. It's a real challenge because of the limitations on what you can do." [Trouser Press, 1979]

JH: "Animals" is kind of hard to play and sing at the same time." [True Stories Behind Every Song by Ian Gittens]

How did you come to write Animals? Did you have a conflict with your cat, or something like that? DB: "In that one the music and words were written completely separately. It was an idea I have had for a while. For a few years I have been curious about the idea of the "noble savage," of being at one with nature, live with one another, harmonious balance, that sort of thing. After a while I just thought "this sounds too trite, it really must be bunk!" So I thought it'd be interesting to write a song that took the opposite point of view. But it seemed that to write a song like that about some primitive tribe would be a little bit too much, so I chose animals. At one point I was going to tie religion into it, it started off saying "Jesus was hairy." talking about Jesus being all covered with fur, but [cracking up] I chopped off that part!"

I took the song as an extreme example of paranoia... DB: "In a way. but I think it's more challenging to present a point of view like that as a really legitimate point of view, not just the rantings of some paranoid person, which I tend to get portrayed as!"

Why do you get portrayed that way? DB: "Well, lots of the songs are a little bit like that, but what I think makes them interesting is that, however off the wall the point of view, | try to make them sound believable and plausible. I have to convince myself when I'm writing them. If I can convince myself then I feel it's successful. I have to write from a point of view that is plausible to me, although it's not something I would go out and tell somebody "this is what I believe in!" In other ones I might take one aspect of my point of view and exaggerate it out of proportion until it's bordering on the ridiculous." [Slash, November 1979]

DB: "I disagree with the idea that animals are noble savages living in harmony with their surroundings and with each other. I thought I'd present a contrary point of view: animals as obstinate beings with lots of problems of their own, and we shouldn't pay any attention to them." [Trouser Press, 1979]

Ninth track (B4) on Little Creatures (1985).

Released as a single with Give Me Back My Name as the B-side.

TW: "We joked a lot about Little Creatures. We said, "This is our white album, ha ha ha." There was no black sound on it whatsoever. Funnily enough, when David started playing "Road To Nowhere," I said, "David, I'm just going to have to do the same bass rhythm as on 'Burning Down The House." When that song started, I was thinking of a Black Uhuru song: Robbie Shakespeare had played this dum-diddit-dum. Because Jerry and David never saw any reggae elements in it, they just played straight rock accents. The two merged without me and Chris ever mentioning it. When we saw Simple Minds in New Zealand last year, the bass player said to me, "I really like that lick. I'm gonna steal it for a song." And he did! But you don't even hear the lick in "Don't You (Forget About Me)" until there's a slight breakdown because it's really buried. "Road To Nowhere" just happened to have the same rhythm." [Musician no. 85, November 1985]

“I wanted to write a song that presented a resigned, even joyful look at doom. At our deaths and at the apocalypse… (always looming, folks). I think it succeeded. The front bit, the white gospel choir, is kind of tacked on, ‘cause I didn’t think the rest of the song was enough… I mean, it was only two chords. So, out of embarrassment, or shame, I wrote an intro section that had a couple more in it.” - DB [Liner notes of Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads]

The music video was directed by David Byrne and Stephen R. Johnson.

It won the Video Vanguard Award at the second annual MTV Video Music Awards in 1985. David wasn’t there in person to collect the award, because he was away filming True Stories. Instead they showed this video of him in a Texas Laundromat, finding his award in his laundry:

Sixth track (B1) on Naked (1988).

G: "Could 'Democratic Circus' be the first political Talking Heads song?" JH: "Maybe, although Life During Wartime had a certain political quality to it. But it wasn't specifically political, I suppose." [Graffiti, June 1988]

DB: "We're actually talking about the electoral process. To me, it's not a democracy as we imagined it. It's disillusioning in a way. But part of that might be because it's not what we would have hoped; it's not what we were led to believe it would be. I like the rain coming at the end, washing it all away, like blood [laughs]. We referred to the song as being a cha-cha." [Rolling Stone, 21 April 1988]

Fifth track (B1) on True Stories (1986).

The music video was directed by David Byrne and Melvin Sokolsky.

"The point of the video was to show how rock and roll bands are treated as products and marketed the same way pancake mix, makeup, and cigarettes are. A well-known television commercial director named Melvin Sokolsky was hired to shoot the band doing various funny things, sometimes with special effects that recalled popular TV commercials for hairspray, roll-on deodorant, and candy bars. These shots were cut in with actual found TV commercials, and at the end each band member was dipped in chocolate and wrapped in shiny colored aluminium foil. It wasn't real chocolate, of course. It was a special kind of clay, delivered in a tanker truck, that simulates and photographs like chocolate. It was cold and it tasted like Pepto Bismol." [Chris Frantz in Remain In Love]

The second video was “Love for Sale”—a montage of real and fake television commercials. It was a brave move making this video, considering how much trouble Neil Young had getting “This Note’s for You,” his anticommercialization of rock video, aired. David made sure every product to be included in the video was approved by MTV beforehand. David even designed the storyboards around the merchandise, which included Pan-Am, Polaroid, Colgate, Isuzu Cars, Canyfields Ale, NutraSweet, Ben-Gay, V-8 Juice, Right Guard, Purolator, Close Up, Oreo, York Biscuits, Mr. and Mrs. Butterworth Light, Old Spice, Country Rock Mastercard, Aim toothpaste, Heinz, and Motorcraft Oil. (...) “I remember ‘Love for Sale’ costing eighty thousand dollars to produce,” David recalled. “Which was staggering to me at the time.” [This Must Be The Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the Twentieth Century by David Bowman]

David behind the scenes of the Love For Sale music video.

The movie says a lot about advertising — such as the “Love for Sale” sequence — and you parodied ad placement. DB: We had to clear all that stuff. It was a lot.

Did Pepsi or any of the other brands pay you for that? DB: No, and we had to use the shots that didn’t have the brand visible in a lot of it, so you just see, like, chocolate pouring down or the bubbles — food-product shots. I think part of it was Talking Heads was fairly successful by that point, so I was thinking, “Are we becoming a brand?” and “How are we going to be packaged as a consumable item? Are we being marketed and all these things that seemed suspect? So what if we do a thing where the band is really a product and turned into chocolate bars?”

Love -> Building On Fire was Talking Heads' very first single. It was released in 1977 with New Feeling as the B-side. In 2005 it was released as the twelfth track on the reissue of Talking Heads: 77.

CF: "Dutch radio played our first single, "Love -> Building On Fire," before any other station in the world. The Dutch people that we met and came to love completely embraced the new." [Remain In Love]

CF: "Some of the first professional photos of us were taken by Jimmy DeSana. Tina and I both remember that he approached David at CBGB about taking some photos of us and we went up to his tiny theater-district apartment to take the shots for the picture sleeve of our first single, "Love -> Building On Fire."" [Remain In Love]

Earliest known demo of Love -> Building On Fire

Seymour Stein (co-founder of Sire Records): "l was standing outside enjoying the weather, talking to Patti Smith's guitarist, Lenny Kaye, when from inside, I heard the lyrics ring out: 'When my love / Stands next to your love / I can't compel love / When it's not love' I was instantly drawn inside like a moth to a flame. I remember saying to Lenny, "That sure don't sound like The Shirts." He said, "The Shirts got a paying job in Staten Island so Hilly let them go... That's the Talking Heads." I was mesmerized during the entire set, ran to the stage as soon as they stopped playing and even tried to help Tina with some of her equipment. I vowed that night that I would sign the band, and, although it took 11-and-a-half months, finally signed Talking Heads on 1st November 1976." [Best of Talking Heads CD booklet]

DB: "They [Psycho Killer and Love -> Building On Fire] might have been the ones that were the most difficult for people to relate to because they weren't about common everyday experiences." [The Tube, Jan 1985]

DB: “In this song, I attempted to deal with love as if it were some kind of mathematical, symbolic, logical thing, where you could draw lines and ‘if-then,’ ‘greater than,’ ‘goes to,’ et cetera, and figure things out through some kind of symbolic, logical deduction. It didn’t really work.” [Talking Heads Chronology Commentary]

Second track (A2) on Remain In Light (1980).

Crosseyed and Painless was released as a single with The Great Curve as the B-side.

DB: "We [...] thought that Crosseyed and Painless would be the easiest introduction [to Remain In Light]" [Countdown 1981]

CF: "David created that title. I'm not sure what he was thinking, but crosseyed and painless is a state that we have all been in in at least one point in our lives. I think he was probably thinking of that state of intoxication." [SongFacts, 2020]

In Crosseyed and Painless, you talk about facts that are always accompanied by a “point of view.” To what extent were you influenced by Brian Eno here?

DB: "Not much. He helped me a little with that song. At one point, I was improvising vocals in the studio, and he wrote down what he thought I was singing. Sometimes he got it right, sometimes not. It resulted in a few pages of text, which I took home and tried to make some sense of. After a few hours of work and rearranging, it became a song." [OOR Magazine #15, 28 July 1982]

CF: "Returning to New York, we arrived at the studio where David was working on the vocal for "Crosseyed and Painless." David had come to an impasse: He didn't know what to do with what would become the "Facts are simple and facts are straight" part of the song. Eno's deck of Oblique Strategy cards, which had served us well up to this point, were no help. David and Brian were both at a loss. This is why it's good to have the band members present in the studio. I said to David, "You know, there's this new thing called rap. You don't have to sing. You don't need a melody. You just rap the lyrics. here, just listen to this!" Then I put a brand-new record called The Breaks by Kurtis Blow on the turntable. "Why not try that in this section?" David went out to the mic and nailed it on the first take. Bam!" [Remain In Love]

“The video for “Crosseyed and Painless,” directed by Toni Basil, featured pop and lock dancing three years before the rest of the would-be hip began dropping street dancing into every video and commercial.” [BAM magazine #192, 5 October 1984]

The breakdance crew dancing in the video were called The Electric Boogaloos.

Sixth track (B1) on Little Creatures (1985).

In 1987, this book called Stay Up Late was published. It’s a collaboration between DB and the artist Maira Kalman, and it contains the lyrics of the song, accompanied by her paintings.

On the left the foreword by David for the book, and on the right the photo of David as a kid that the drawing is based on.

The music video was directed by Ted Bufaloukos, and Chris Frantz developed the concept.

Third track (A3) on More Songs About Buildings And Food (1978).

CF: "We had a song called "The Good Thing" that Brian, who loved amateur musicianship, suggested we invite the women who worked in the studio offices to sing on the choruses. Tina led them and sang with them. The idea was that they would somehow sound like Chinese youth in the days of Chairman Mao and, amazingly, they did! They were credited on the album as Tina and the Typing Pool." [Remain In Love]

DB: "That song has a couple of different things. It was written as a reaction to dealing with the music business. I felt that the music business is essentially amoral, and it's not its business to promote something that someone feels is GOOD." (...) "But anyway, I guess in the song I'm speaking to myself and talking about morality and trying to convince myself that this is what is important - to stay on the straight line and do what's good and moral. I had been reading a lot of Chairman Mao at the time, and it came out like an English translation of that sort of thing." [Melody Maker, 29 July 1978]

DB: "I'd been reading a lot of books about systems theory and management theory, theories about how the structure of a business can be like that of an organism. And how the creative process can be broken down into almost a computer flow chart. So I started looking at music and the structure of words that way. [...] It's a philosophy that tends to be very mechanistic, and I found that fascinating for a while. I was trying to see, I guess, in some vain hope, if there was an underlying rational basis for everything." [Thinking Mans Rockstar, 1985]

Seventh track (B4) on Remain In Light (1980).

Byrne has always imagined other worlds in his music. One of his most interesting songs, Listening Wind, from the 1980 album Remain In Light, tells the story of a foreign terrorist, Mojique, who plans to bomb American colonialists. "Woof!" Byrne exclaims, when I mention the song. "I don't know if I could get away with performing that live anymore! Wooaaaooh! Nothing's changed. God, nothing's changed at all. We should send that off as a little bonus CD for the troops." I ask whether he has empathy or understanding for people who are perpetrating acts of terror against the United States. "Yeah, I think I do a little bit. But you never know, I'm not there. I certainly understand a part of it. I understand why America is not universally loved. That's been obvious to me for years and years, but it's not obvious to a lot of Americans. Their immediate reaction is, 'They love us, they're just jealous. They just want McDonald's.'" [The Herald, March 21, 2004]

David's notes, these lyrics weren't used in the end

Do you have specific images in your head for certain songs, for example for the song ‘Listening Wind’? For that song I imagined a place like Algeria. It’s a pretty specific image. In other songs I’d simply imagine a situation and wrote down ideas which would come out of that situation. I would not only describe what I see, but above all what that situation conjures up in me. I often have the impression my lyrics are very unclear, as well as the music itself. They are like images from a dream which do not say exactly what they represent. But I hope they have the same power as dreams have. [Rock 82 #17, 1982]

First track (A1) on Speaking In Tongues (1983).

Burning Down The House was released as a single with I Get Wild / Wild Gravity as the B-side.

TW: “This song started from a jam. Chris had just been to see Parliament-Funkadelic in its full glory at Madison Square Garden, and he was really hyped. During the jam, he kept yelling “Burn down the house!” which was a P-Funk audience chant, and David dug the line, changing it to the finished version, “Burning Down The House.” [Liner notes of Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads]

Somewhere in the middle of shopping-mall America, David Byrne got the disillusionment of his life. This man who had recorded half a dozen records, signed numerous contracts, been on every show from American Bandstand to Saturday Night Live, learned from a chance comment from Kurfirst that “Burning Down the House” had become a hit due to money passing hands. Years later this still upsets David. “Although payola* was not supposed to happen, it does. (...) Seymour Stein said years later, “There isn’t a hit that isn’t bought. There are no natural hits. It’s the nature of the beast. I’m surprised that David was upset about it because in reality, with all the money in the world, you can’t make a hit out of a bad song.” He was quiet for a moment. “And Warner Bros.—especially in that period—they played by the rules more than their competitors.” He paused. “Sometimes to my frustration.” David said, “I don’t know who was involved or what happened, I know a fair amount of money was spent to break that song. It wasn’t that the song didn’t have merits or we didn’t connect. But that connection can’t happen without other stuff thrown in. A little extra help... A lot of little extra help... Money. Maybe that’s the way things work. But it was disillusioning at the time.” In fact, now when the band played “Burning Down the House,” David found himself looking at the audience and thinking, “Oh, what a bunch of sheep. You've all just been bought by hearing one song on the radio that’s been bought.” He was losing his faith in the audience, for the people he was singing for. “I don’t think I ever got it all back,” he said decades later. “Ever since then it’s been very easy for me to see the public, the critics, myself included, go for somethin’ that’s been orchestrated. Sometimes that orchestration has been done well, and if the thing that’s being pushed actually does have some merit or tap into something, well, then it works. We all hear it. And we all think, ‘Hey, I like that song.’ Or, ‘I like that movie.’ Or whatever. We all think it was our own.” [This Must Be The Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the Twentieth Century by David Bowman]

[*Payola is the illegal or undisclosed practice of paying someone to promote something (usually music) while pretending the promotion is unbiased or organic. Record labels secretly pay radio stations or DJs to play certain songs so they become hits.]

The music video was directed by David Byrne.

Eighth track (B4) on True Stories (1986).

In True Stories songs are a motley collection in style and subject. How did they come together? DB: "Well, I did them pretty early after I had some basic scenes and characters and I wrote them to order. A song like "People Like Us", written to express what I imagine Louis Fyne would say in a style he'd like (country and western), was pretty easy. That song might have taken a few days though it wasn't until the third attempt that the music and words and spirit seemed to gel, whereas if I was writing something for Talking Heads, if something didn't work out, I'd just chuck it away and abandon it. In this case I had to fill a space in the film so the song at the end had to sound like an ordinary pop song. I had to keep trying to get it to sound ordinary enough." [The Face, October 1986]

In the film's keynote song, "People Like Us", the amiably everyman character Louis Fyne sings, "People like us / Gonna make it because / We don't want freedom / We don't want justice / We just want someone to love…" Are most people so preoccupied with their immediate needs that they abdicate civic and democratic responsibilities? DB: "Mmm-hmm. People really do want more immediate gratification, and the song puts it kind of bluntly. I think it works in the song, but it would be difficult to admit that, that they'd prefer to I have a comfortable sofa and an evening watching television than freedom of the press or whatever." (...) "I find that sometimes people in the film did something more appropriate to the song, like the guy who played Louis Fyne (John Goodman), his voice gave more authentic a country interpretation of that song ("People Like Us ") than I did." [New Musical Express, September 6, 1986]

We don't want freedom / We don't want justice / We just want someone to love / Someone to love

DB: “The lyric is maybe a little too on the nose. It tries a little too hard to make the point—the point that justice, for example, is a value liberals hold high, but lots of folks value love and family above that. I wanted folks—folks like me—to empathize with that point of view.” [Slate, 29 November 2018]

Sung by John Goodman in True Stories

Eleventh track (B5) on More Songs About Buildings And Food (1978).

"David got the title from the TV show The Big Valley." [This Must Be The Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the Twentieth Century by David Bowman]

It seems to reflect the feelings of someone who is literally torn between opposite feelings towards his country, who can love it and loathe it at the same time… DB: "Yeah, I like that. I like the idea of about eighty percent of the song being a fairly objective description of the view from an airplane, the daily life, nothing really objectionable described, and then the person suddenly switches and decides he doesn't like any of it. I had trouble with that song until I got to that one part where I created that contradiction, and it was one of those songs that when that happened, I didn't understand why it worked but it really seemed to do something, and I was happy with it. Talking Heads is such an all-American looking group, this attitude towards the country surprised me quite a lot… Did you get any feedback as far as the message of that song? Such clean looking young people… DB: "Republican looking?" Almost… expressing such feelings? DB: "I must say I was wary of it at first, because expressing a negative attitude towards normal people's lives in the suburbs or wherever has been done a lot in rock n roll, and it's an easy target, a cheap shot, and it does not really serve any purpose. But then when it was finished I thought, no, it's not quite as cheap as that, it's not elitist, it's not looking down your nose at somebody." [Slash, November 1979]

TW: "The only one that I really don't like is 'The Big Country'. I deliberately wanted to create something really dumb [laughs]. Because I think, oftentimes, confronted with David's lyrics, we would interject into the song through the arrangement of the instruments. And so sometimes we would just do something that was completely contrary to whatever he was singing about. Sometimes we would make it very happy if it was a very sad thing, you know, and mostly, contrary to whatever he was singing about. Sometimes we would make it very happy if it was a very sad thing, you know, and mostly, people took it as being ironic, but in 'The Big Country', I thought, 'Oh my gosh!' So you had to pick one's battles. We couldn't say 'Noo!' to things that might turn out well, so who was I to say no to 'The Big Country'? It was very contemptuous of people." [Far Out Magazine, 2020] TW: "Cynicism is one of the easiest ways of seeming clever. I thought that song was mean-spirited." [Talking Heads Once in a Lifetime The Story Behind Every Song by lan Gittens]

"'The Big Country' is a curious song," Byrne said recently by email. "If you look, the lyrics in the verses are more or less objective- there's no disdain for the folks down there. It's pure description; in fact, one could even say it's sweet and bucolic, which makes the venom of the chorus more surprising (in my view). To me this song is about revealing the irrationality of that venom." [Slate, 29 November 2018] DB: "The view from the aeroplane - there's absolutely nothing to be disgusted about. Its just trees and farms and so on, and when people read the words, they make up their own reason why the person who is singing it is disgusted. It wasn't meant to be anything at all." [Melody Maker, 29 July 1978]

Sixth track (A6) on Talking Heads: 77 (1977).

CF: "One day, while mixing the song "No Compassion," we noticed that the snare drum sound was not as powerful as we felt it should be. I'm not sure how I thought of this, because I'd never mixed a record before, but I asked Ed [Stasium, producer] if we could send the snare drum signal out through a speaker in the studio and re-mic it, using the studio as a large chamber. Ed looked at me and said, "Aha!" He tried it, and it worked really well in an early gated-reverb style." [Remain In Love]

Andrea [Kovacs] wasn't positive. "The Book I Read" was about Mary [Clarke], but she knew David had written a song about her: No Compassion. "I think David was going through such a bad period," she said. "He held on to me like a lifeline. I knew his ideas and his dreams. He had opened up to me. I was an artist, and I was very popular at school; in a way, I represented what he wanted for his life. One day, David showed up in a grotesque white plastic raincoat. He was pale. Something about the way he was dressed revolted me. It was his weakness, his groping showing. I was very cruel. I had no compassion for him. I told him, 'Get out. Just go home.' Why was I doing this? I didn't explain. He started to grab for some books, some things he'd left there. I said, 'Get your books and get out.' It was very cold. I put down an iron curtain." (...) "What followed was like A Clockwork Orange, in which all the bad things the narrator did in the first part of the book came back to haunt him in the second: Andrea began moping around, complaining that her artistic career wasn't moving quickly enough. Byrne's reply was, "Get off your high horse and get a job." "He said to me exactly what I had said to him," she recalled. "He was giving me the same treatment. I got a miserable job, and my self-esteem started to tumble down, down, down, while David's was starting to build, build, build. I became the weaker one, clinging to him like a comet taking off." [Talking Heads by Jerome Davis]

TW: "David was dating a girl, a really terrific girl - a wonderful artist, so smart. He got so many ideas from her. But at one point, he just got cruel. He wrote this song, which is so negative: "Go talk to your analyst/Isn't that what they're paid for?" It's as close as it ever comes to something autobiographical with him, because mostly it's just snippets from newspapers, it's much more of a cut-and-paste, William Burroughs way of getting things, phrases that people say, and then sewing them together like a patchwork quilt. I thought, 'Wow that is one hell of a mean song. But it rings true.' People go through different moods and periods. That's an interesting aspect, and nothing should be discounted out of hand." [Uncut, March 2024]

Eighth track (B2) on Fear Of Music (1979).

TW: “What makes Eno a great leader is that he’s willing to share everything he knows. Eno thinks our albums are hoovering music, which was suggested by David’s manner of moving around in the studio,” Tina said, imitating quirky gestures. “David moves around the studio as if he were a janitor cleaning up and vacuuming while whistling an idiotic tune. His second description of our music is ‘music to do your housework by.’ [Creem, October 1979]

Two weeks later, on the second day of recording, Tina wasn't feeling great. Eno found himself at the sink doing the Frantz/Weymouth dishes to help. As he stood there, he observed David moving around the loft, whistling an idiotic tune as if he were a janitor cleaning up. He told Eno this was music "to do housework by." David Byrne later called this kind of music "Hoovering." One of David's new songs was Hoovering supreme, it was called Heaven. [David Bowman's book Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa]

The song 'Heaven' is very typical. Byrne explains that he borrowed the melody from the evergreen "The Rose Of San Antone" and that the lyrics were inspired by Werner Herzog's film Fata Morgana. This is very typical: an everyday tearjerker and a "difficult" art film go hand in hand for Byrne. [OOR Magazine, 1986]

TW: "'Heaven,' for instance, was a song David wanted to be a crooner on, like Frank Sinatra; he wanted to have a song where he could really sing. He had guitar chords and a vocal melody, but there was something wrong with the way it went from verse to chorus. Jerry basically transcribed the same melody into another key, and then it followed. Because it was essentially a country song, it was automatic what Chris and I would play." [Trouser Press, 1979]

CF: "I connected to the song Heaven, but I didn't relate to the idea that heaven is a place where nothing ever happens, I understand it's kind of a zen thing, but I didn't really connect with it. I did like the chord changes - it reminded me of a Neil Young song." [SongFacts, 2020]

David had been listening to Neil Young's Zuma and Tonight's the Night, and he was trying to write a Werner Herzog/Neil Young song. [David Bowman's book Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa]

Is Heaven the name of a nightclub or disco in New York?

DB: "I don't know. It could be. It wouldn't surprise me. I wrote that song based on a sudden idea I had about heaven being a place where nothing ever happens. That seemed oddly plausible to me." [OOR Magazine, 28 July 1982]

Do you still think heaven is a place where nothing ever happens?

DB: "Yes. If you’re trying to conceptualize what perfection would be, what is it? Let’s say it’s not people in robes playing harps, but it’s some kind of blissful state. Whatever the blissful state is, it’s working out fine, so it’s all a big loop. It just keeps going on over and over and over again, whether your particular blissful state happens to take place in a music club or at a party or whatever it is, it’s just on an endless loop, and that’s perfection right there. But when it’s described that way, of course, it sounds ridiculous." [Rolling Stone, October 2020]

David's notes

First track (A1) on Naked (1988).

Blind was released as a single with Bill as the B-side. (Bill wasn't included on the album, originally)

Of the new songs on 'Naked,' how does "Blind" speak back to you? DB: It's pure imagination, but it comes out of reading the daily paper. It's a cry of anguish. It's a man crying, rather than a woman. And I think it's directed at the authorities. Someone has been killed, or badly beaten, and someone else is looking out a window. Terrible things are happening, civil strife. It definitely goes beyond just lack of sight. The more it's repeated, the more references are implied and the more it resonates with all the meanings within that word or phrase. And you're asking yourself and the listener to be aware of all that. [Rolling Stone, 21 April 1988]

TW: Studio Davout in Paris used to be a big movie theatre. You can fit a huge orchestra in the big room (which is what Michel Legrand does). David uncharacteristically wore a suit to his vocal session, as well as a pair of clear glass black horn-rims. He looked so small as he sat at large office desk (bureau, in French), with a tiny desk lamp shining down on some lyric-less blank paper, (presumably, there were some squiggly lines in a strange short-hand notation to indicate what and where he would sing) His hands lay palms down, fingers splayed to either side of the paper, and he never moved them except during the instrumental section, to reach for a glass of water that stood in the shadows to one side. The entire vocal was written improvisationally with those in the control room, making suggestions as to which parts worked and David memorizing them on the spot. The only lyric that came from that improvisation was the chorus in which he sang "Blahnd, Blahnd, Blahnd". His head moved like a muppet and we all watched, fascinated, as if he were a bug on a pin under a microscope. Jonathan Demme, you should have been there with your camera! [Liner notes of Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads]

The music video was directed by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton.

Second studio album. Released on September 16th, 1978.

Production & Recording

Recorded at Compass Point in Nassau, Bahamas. All songs aside from Found A Job and The Big Country were written and performed between 1974-1977. Talking Heads' first of three albums working with Brian Eno. In May 1977, Brian saw the band play in London and said he was keen to work with them. Recording started in March 1978. The engineer was Rhett Davies and the assistent engineer was Benji Armbrister.

Compass Point Studios was newly built back then, and Talking Heads was the first band to record there. The studio was located across the road from the sea. David shared an apartment at Delaporte Point with Rhett Davies. Jerry, Chris, Tina, and Tina's sister Laura shared a little bungalow at the Nassau Beach Hotel. (Tina: "Yes, she totally surprised us when she turned up with Jerry!") And Brian Eno slept in Chris Blackwell's guest house called Sea Pussy. Tina: "We would swim in the sea in the mornings while Jerry wind-surfed before taking off on West Bay Street toward New Providence's second oldest town, Gambier Village, which abutted Compass Point Studios. David and Rhett would drive in separately."

JH: "Working with Eno was totally different than working with Tony Bongiovi. Tony was used to working with session players and was known for his sophisticated knowledge of the recording process. Brian saw the the studio as a salon of experimentation. He would usually add a "treatment" effects in the recording chain to instruments as we recorded" [MSABAF boxset book, 2025]

TW: "Most days we worked from noon until dinner time, knocking off around seven or eight. Lunch and dinner were often sandwiches, but we discovered we most enjoyed the local restaurant, Traveller's Rest, which werved all the Bahamian specialties that could be made to-go if we worked later than regular." [MSABAF boxset book, 2025]

Title

TW: "Finally, I took a chance and said, "What do you call an album a consisting of more songs about buildings and food?" Chris said, "More Songs About Buildings And Food, of course!" Brian [Eno] loved it, and David and Jerry agreed. For a long time I thought it might have been an idea born off a funky little roadside restaurant sign that we passed repeatedly en route from New York to Boston that advertised "Food and Books." It always felt so very Talking Heads to us! However, in 1996, while recording with us in Connecticut, Andy Partridge reminded me that it was he who had first suggested the title when XTC toured with Talking Heads in late 1978. So it turns out we have Andy to thank for implanting that seed in my mind in the small after- hours on a small cobblestoned street in Holland after a very late show." [MSABAF boxset book, 2025]

Album art

Conceived by David Byrne, executed by Jimmy DeSana

CF: "When we returned from the Bahamas, David and Tina took the Polaroid photos that formed the mosaic of the band on the album cover. This was done on the roof of our loft building in Long Island City." [Remain In Love]

TW: "The front-cover photo was a concept David had that was inspired by other artists, including his former girlfriend Andrea Kovacs, who had previously used Polaroid photos to create a composite whole picture. David took the pictures of Chris, Jerry, and me, while I took the pictures of David. We used a close-up attachment and a red cloth for the backdrop. It was shot on the roof above Chris' and my Long Island City loft. (I still have that camera!) The back-cover image was one David found, a thermal satellite image of the United States at night. In our minds these represented the micro and the macro of our touring life as a band trying to conquer hearts, minds, and spirits with love of music." [MSABAF boxset book, 2025]

Andrea Kovacs [David's ex girlfriend] wrote David a furious letter complaining that he had ripped off her mosaic photographic style. Mary Clarke [David's girlfriend and Kovacs' friend] remembered that Kovacs' polaroid work wasn’t mosaic so much as continuous action shots like movie frames. [David Bowman in Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa: The adventures of Talking Heads in the 20th Century, Book Two, Kings Lead Hat.]