Formed in New York City in 1975, Talking Heads quickly set themselves apart from the punk scene gathering pace in the city, both in image (preppy and clean-cut) and sound (angular, but with a deep appreciation of soul, funk and disco).
Over the course of eight studio albums, the band – David Byrne, lead vocals and guitar; Chris Frantz, drums; Jerry Harrison, keyboards and guitar; Tina Weymouth, bass – established themselves as one of the most innovative bands on the planet, forever forging forward with new sounds and working methods. They announced their split in 1991 (though had already embarked on individual solo careers), leaving behind an inspiring and fascinating body of work. Here’s our pick of their best songs.
Talking Heads songs, ranked
19. Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town (1977)
The first song from their 1977 debut album Talking Heads: 77, and an early sign that Talking Heads would stand apart from the CBGB crowd. Frantz lays down a light, swaggering groove, while Weymouth’s nimble bassline owes a debt to Motown great, James Jamerson. If that baffled the punks, instrumental passages lit up by steel drums must’ve had their heads spinning. Meanwhile, David Byrne already sounds like nobody else as he sing-yelps a lyric concerned with the incapacitating effects of love.
18. I Zimbra (1979)
Talking Heads’ third album, Fear Of Music, was a giant and uncompromising leap forward – most obviously on its deeply funky opener, ‘I Zimbra’. Frenetic beats were provided by some titans of African percussion: Hossom Ramzy (surdo), Abdou M’Boup (djembe, talking drum) and Assane Thiaim (percussion), along with congas courtesy of Gene Wilder (not that one) and the mononymous Ari, who Bryne and producer Brian Eno had seen busking in New York City’s Washington Square.
Meanwhile, guitarists Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp unleash fretboard pyrotechnics over the heaviest of grooves. Bryne’s gleeful cries might be utter nonsense – the lyrics are based on Hugo Ball’s Dadaist poem Gadji Beri Bimba – but they sound fantastic.
17. The Big Country (1978)
Few songs sum up David Byrne’s idiosyncratic approach to songwriting like the closing track of Talking Heads’ second album, 1978's More Songs About Buildings and Food. The narrator of the song is flying above an undisclosed American city, blankly noting the things below him and their functions ('A baseball diamond, nice weather down there/I see the school and the houses where the kids are').
But as the city is left behind and Byrne surveys the blank expanses of agricultural land beneath him, his tone shifts, calling them ‘the undeveloped areas’. While he suggests he understands there might be benefits to country living, he spits, ‘I wouldn’t live there if you paid me/I wouldn’t live like that, no sirree/I wouldn’t do the things the way those people do, I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to.’
Is this a smug city slicker, or is it a neurodivergent spooked by the wild vastness of nature? Either way, who else was writing songs like this in the late ’70s?
16. The Great Curve (1980)
Inspired by David Byrne and producer Brian Eno’s game-changing collaboration, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (eventually released in 1981, following issues clearing samples), Remain In Light saw Talking Heads pursue radically different methods. Rather than work up Byrne’s songs layer by layer, they embarked upon extended jam sessions which were then cut and looped by Eno, and then overdubbed.
- We named Remain in Light one of the best albums of the 1980s
Propelled by polyrhythmic percussion and rapturous backing vocals that speak of a divine creation goddess, 'The Great Curve' draws upon Byrne and Eno’s African-inspired sojourn. It’s breathless stuff, brimming with excitement and ideas – just check out the convulsing elephant-like noises that Adrian Belew wrestles from his guitar just after the two-minute mark.
15. Making Flippy Floppy (1983)
The twitchy robo-funk of ‘Making Flippy Floppy’ draws upon the fresh sounds emerging from hip-hop to make something as danceable as it was weird. Lyrically, it weighs up the ways in which individuals compromise to fit into society and ponders the consequences of stepping out of line: 'Snap into position, bounce till you ache/You step out of line and, you end up in jail.' Hardly typical fodder for a funked-up dancefloor filler, but by this point, Talking Heads made up their own rules.
14. Cities (1979)
As ‘Cities’ fades in, accompanied by the sound of sirens, you wonder exactly how long the band have cooking this up out of earshot. In other hands, this could be a straightforward disco banger, with Frantz and Weymouth locked in on a relentlessly funky rhythm track, but this being Talking Heads, there are plenty of twists.
The scratchy rhythm guitar suggests and underlying anxiety, while a conventional guitar solo appears to have been replaced by a mic’ed-up and seasick vacuum cleaner around the two-minute mark. Meanwhile, Byrne delivers a lyric about the relative benefits of various cities while working himself up into an increasingly frantic state that culminates in a frantic bark, again suggesting a sense of constant unease.
13. Nothing But Flowers (1988)
For their final album, 1988’s Naked, Talking Heads shook things up. As Chris Frantz later told Billboard, 'We all went back there [in his and Tina Weymouth’s Long Island City loft, where Fear Of Music was recorded] and recorded these improvs on cassette. We were all very happy, including David, about the direction it was going. We did about 20 of these little musical snippets; not exactly songs, but more starting-off points, and took those with us to Paris.'
Once the group arrived in France, they invited 30 or so musicians from all over Europe to work with them on fleshing those ideas out, most successfully on ‘Nothing But Flowers’. A guitar cameo from Johnny Marr and backing vocals from Kirsty MacColl are weaved into an irresistible slice of shimmering, Afrobeat infused pop.
The lyrics, meanwhile, are from the perspective of a character horrified by a world in which nature has reclaimed the planet from rampant capitalism – another example of Byrne’s predilection for oddball and untrustworthy narrators.
12. Heaven (1979)
Among the taut, edgy sonic terrain of Fear Of Music, ‘Heaven’ feels like a balmy oasis of simplicity and beauty. And it almost didn’t happen. Legend has it that Byrne was humming the melody to himself – at this point it was from a discarded song – while washing dishes and was overheard by Eno, who insisted it was worked up into a new song.
In the heaven Byrne is singing about, almost deadpan, 'Nothing ever happens'. Whether that’s interpreted as a none-more-zen way of coming to terms with mortality, or a comment on the futility of looking for perfection, is up to you, dear listener.
11. And She Was (1985)
Showing that, should the mood take them, Talking Heads were capable of effervescent earworms, ‘And She Was’ is a buoyant piece of pop perfection. Of course, there was a twist – Byrne’s lyrics concerned themselves with a girl having an out-of-body experience and floating over her hometown. ‘It wasn't a drugs song at all,’ Byrne told Q magazine in 1992. ‘I think it gives the impression of a spiritual or emotional experience, instantaneous and unprovoked. The sublime can come out of the ridiculous.’
10. Slippery People (1983)
For a group as in thrall to R&B as Talking Heads, having a song covered by The Staple Singers was the ultimate seal of approval – and that’s exactly what happened when ‘Slippery People’ was given the Staples’ treatment in 1984, reaching No 22 on the US R&B chart.
While it might have seemed an unlikely cover, the song was the most obvious manifestation of David Byrne’s interest in gospel – a spirited call-and-response with powerhouse guest vocalist Nona Hendryx over a pulsing minimal funk backing with deft synth flourishes. But the lyrics take a left turn from traditional gospel, with a critical look at religion and the slippery people in positions of power.
9. Psycho Killer (1977)
The only Talking Heads song credited to Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth and, incredibly, the first song Byrne wrote, ‘Psycho Killer’ is surely the best-loved song to inhabit the headspace of a serial killer. It was apparently written as joke, as Byrne later said: ‘I had been listening to Alice Cooper – Billion Dollar Babies, I think – and I thought it was really funny stuff.
'I thought, Hey, I can do this!… I thought I would write a song about a very dramatic subject the way [Alice Cooper] does, but from inside the person, playing down the drama… It seemed a natural delusion that a psychotic killer would imagine himself as very refined and use a foreign language to talk to himself.’
Byrne’s extraordinary performance – in which he inhabits the persona of the narrator with a convincing nervous energy – paired with one of the most recognisable of all basslines and captivated generations of fans.
8. Found A Job (1978)
Only David Byrne could write a song examining creativity and predict the reality TV phenomenon of a few decades later along the way. ‘Found A Job’ begins with a couple taking out their frustrations about the quality of TV on each other ('fighting over little things and wasting precious time', as Bryne puts it). He goes on to explore what may happen if that energy was channelled in a more positive way – in this instance, making their own TV programmes.
The couple’s relationship is saved and they’re having too much fun to worry about the TV anymore. Byrne wraps it up by suggesting that we can all learn from them when it comes to placing creativity at the centre of our lives: ‘So think about this little scene, apply it to your life/If your work isn’t what you love, then something isn’t right.’ The whole thing is set to an unabating, tightly wound funk-dance backdrop.
7. Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On) (1980)
The first track on Remain In Light quickly establishes the mood of the record – wired-sounding, claustrophobic and fidgety funk, with Byrne yelling strange and evocative phrases like a street preacher. Here, he gets inside the skin of a ‘government man’ as he ponders the relationship between the politically oppressed and their oppressors. As ever, though, his intentions are ambiguous – as the music becomes denser with wild instrumental interludes, the identity of the narrator and their motivations blur, and the listener loses themselves to the rhythm.
6. Girlfriend Is Better (1983)
Speaking In Tongues saw Talking Heads let a little light back in after the dense and tetchy soundscapes of Fear Of Music and Remain In Light. One such example is the spry sci-fi funk of ‘Girlfriend Is Better’. While Byrne contemplates romantic temptation, the band kick up a storm behind him, with synth wizard Bernie Worrell (a founding member of Parliament-Funkadelic) contributing witty and weird musical embellishments that add a cartoonish dimension to proceedings.
The coda, in which Byrne implores us to 'stop making sense', would provide Jonathan Demme’s peerless 1984 concert film.
5. Crosseyed And Painless (1980)
There’s a palpable sense of urgency here as Byrne’s lyric, seemingly from the perspective of a person on the verge of a breakdown (he begins, 'Lost my shape, trying to act casual/Can’t stop, I might end up in a hospital'), is set to a galloping and unstoppable groove. As the band keep pushing, Byrne attempts a tongue-twisting, robot-like rap, again suggesting that the group were open-minded and adventurous enough to embrace new forms of music as they emerged.
4. Life During Wartime (1979)
How many other songs written from the perspective of an undercover vigilante can you dance to? ‘Life During Wartime’ evolved from a bass riff that Tina Weymouth wrote at sessions at Allen Toussaint’s Sea-Saint Studios in New Orleans.
It mutated into an insistent, horn-laden and deadly groove, the perfect musical foil for Byrne’s lyrics, which predict a dystopian future – something that fascinated him, as he suggested to NME in 1979: ‘There will be chronic food shortages and gas shortages and people will live in hovels. Paradoxically, they’ll be surrounded by computers the size of wrist watches… I think we’ll be cushioned by amazing technological development and sitting on Salvation Army furniture.
'Everything else will be crumbling. Government surveillance becomes inevitable because there’s this dilemma when you have an increase in information storage. A lot of it is for your convenience – but as more information gets on file it’s bound to be misused.’
3. Burning Down The House (1983)
Talking Heads’ highest-charting single in the US (it reached No.9 on the Billboard Hot 100), ‘Burning Down The House’ explodes into life with a thwack of Chris Frantz’s drum and doesn’t let up from there, with powerhouse performances all round.
The title was inspired by a P-Funk show that Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth attended at Madison Square Garden, in which the crowd started chanting ‘Burn down the house! Burn down the house!’ in response to Parliament’s ‘Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)’.
2. This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody) (1983)
‘This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)’ was an outlier among Talking Heads songs. Here, Byrne appeared to be singing a simple and direct love song – granted, he sounded like a newly sentient robot exploring these strange things called feelings, but that makes it all the more affecting.
To begin with, Byrne’s neuroses linger ('I feel numb, born with a weak heart/I guess I must be having fun') but as the song progresses with a bittersweet and flat-out gorgeous electro-pop backing, he accepts the comfort that love can bring ('Home is where I want to be/But I guess I’m already there'.)
1. Once In A Lifetime (1980)
That hypnotic bassline, the crystalline and bubbling synth line, David Byrne’s radio evangelist-inspired performance – it all adds up to something transcendent. Though some have seen ‘Once In A Lifetime’ as a tirade against the rampant consumerism that the ’80s ushered in, Byrne himself has suggested the song implores the listener to take stock of their lives:
'We’re largely unconscious. You know, we operate half-awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else. We haven’t really stopped to ask ourselves, "How did I get here?”' In urging us to appreciate life, rather than let it pass by without stopping to think, Byrne and Talking Heads created something utterly vital for the ages.
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