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

Excellent point, maresn3st! --- 'once in a lifetime' is one of those songs that i've heard so many times over decades that I don't actually 'hear' it anymore, but that low voice doubling the bass part is bigtime genius. I'm sure it made a tremendous initial impression on me when the album came out, because 'zooming in' on it again now you've mentioned it has really brought the song fully back to life for me (and it's been awhile, even though it's never NOT a pleasure to hear it, when listening to the album from top to finish I'm always like, OK -- Side 2 now, and for too long, 'OILT' existed just to set off the chain of increasingly ominous and decreasingly uptempo steps leading to the climactic, if somewhat sickening, deep drone and chopper blades pleasure of the album-ending harmonic stasis of (... like MF DOOM, its gotta be ALL CAPS) --- 'THE OVERLOAD'.

"detached anthropology of horrors" otm

Recreating that beautiful, percolating sequencer line in OIAL has always been troublesome in any live version I've heard

I read somewhere that Harrison built it up in the studio using Eno's EMS Synthi AKS. Once the AKS was switched off, the sequence was lost, and as soon as any of its dials or patch pins were moved, so was the sound. So that part actually was a once in a lifetime thing.

Patches dissolving

And patches removing

There are patches at the bottom of the ocean

I think I saw Byrne getting close to it whenever I saw him play live, but my memory is fuzzy. I mean, nowadays it could just be lifted from the master tapes.

I wanted to say that I think Uh Oh was the best thing Byrne did post-1983, maybe even post-1980.

I'd say the eponymous 1994 album co-produced by Arto Lindsay is his best collection of post-Heads material.

In a recent Nardwuar video with David Byrne a record store owner gave Byrne a reel tape of Remain in Light sessions he had for some reason. I don't know if it contained anything that hasn't been released already.

The reason the sus4 is significant (instead of a sus2) is because the bass plays with the 3rd and 5th, ~around~ the 4th— it’s all intrinsic to the destabilization of the key centre, which in turn makes the guitar/synth solo entrance toward the end that much more of a fist pump [/jacobcollier]

Once In A Lifetime famously shifts the placement of the downbeat, it’s in one place on the verses and another on the choruses

Sorry fgti but I still maintain you're wrong on this, and I will go to Ludacris lengths to defend it.

I have spent a lot of time going deep with Remain In Light— transcribing the bassline to Born Under Punches (and noting subsequently that the band never gets it exactly right in the live setting, even with two bassists). I tried to dupe the synth sound on Lifetime and it’s not impossible to approximate— there is something oddly non-sequential about it, almost as if it was played by hand. It’s pretty accurate on The Name Of This Band— but all wrong on Stop Making Sense

Weirdly tho what I think contributes largely to the demystification of Lifetime on Stop Making Sense is that the pointillist bassline has been fleshed out. On the studio recordings there is never a bass note on the downbeat of the 1, but in the film soundtrack, it hits it every time

Getting back to the bassline on Punches, tho— what a weird thing it is, on the recording, these three descending syncops over the downbeat, nothing remotely groovy. Virtually impossible to play in the live setting, it’s no wonder it was simplified

Once In A Lifetime famously shifts the placement of the downbeat, it’s in one place on the verses and another on the choruses

Sorry fgti but I still maintain you're wrong on this, and I will go to Ludacris lengths to defend it.

I will admit to having been wrong about Ludacris but there’s no way I’m wrong about Lifetime. Everybody involved has copped to the ambiguous placement of the downbeat

I fed Once into RipX to see if I could get a good listen to the keyboard bubbling, it's not a totally clean extraction (never is), but it gives us a good idea of what is involved.

It has to be more than one layer, there's a constant drone that could be notes (or a pad) through a very long reverb.

https://we.tl/t-RmGWambTpuD1Jdht

It is also kinda interesting, the stereo width on the sound that comes and goes throughout, like it's been fed through a short delay and panned left and right.

Stereolab come close on "OLV 26" from ETK.

I don't hear any ambiguity about the downbeat in "Once in a Lifetime", other than the vocal phrases regularly coming in on the next beat. It starts with a drum/crash hit and a bass slide on the 4, and the beat is much too strong to allow the vocal lines to wrong-foot my ear, at least.

the eponymous 1994 album co-produced by Arto Lindsay is his best collection of post-Heads material

I found this an earnest, well-crafted bore.

Nah, not at all, it moves: Byrne's got too ingrained a sense of rhythm to devolve into the somnolence of acoustic sensitivity.

Everybody involved has copped to the ambiguous placement of the downbeat

What has Byrne said about it? As discussed on the Ludacris thread, two people can conceptualize the downbeat differently and still play together, especially if it's a set arrangement. But I have to believe that he hears the chorus starting on the upbeat after 1, especially having played it with so many bands (I've even seen him play it sitting in with a friend's band).

It's just so simple, the Occam's Razor approach almost always wins out in these situations (Ludacris, and MJ's Rock Your World and D'Angelo's Betray My Heart have come up with friends). The first vocal note of the chorus starts on the & of 1, and then everything else in the whole song lines up with even bar lengths and phrasing. And live versions make it even more obvious from what I can remember.

fwiw i somehow got my 5.1 downmix of ril into my phone library, and when i hit that album, it’s like finding the library of alexandria, i’m fucking almost tearful by “seen and not seem” which might seem creepy, but to me,as a kid in mid 80’s, it was an anthem of possibility. i see few references to song ever. probly rightly, as far as music goes

Too many elements of the song-- most notably the chorus guitar part, but also the keyboard riff on the "same as it ever was" verse-- play out like a 2/4 bar has occurred for me to agree with you. "Days" of "letting the days go by" makes more sense to fall on the 1 than the 3, after a bar of 2/4 has occurred. Count it as necessary to have it performed but my ears will never un-hear the added bars, and no live version I've heard dispels this interpretation.

xp

Listen to the fills and cymbal crashes going into the chorus! No one is building up to "days" as if "letting the" is a pickup. The rhythm of the vocal is five dotted 1/8ths starting on the first upbeat, like a bossa nova or what I think of as the New Orleans clave. To my ears all the other instrumental parts totally make sense without the 2/4 bar too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGofoH9RDEA

I agree, I can't hear the three as the downbeat even if I count it out loud as "one" along with the recording. At most I'd say they are emphasizing the third beat.

jordan and htbfy holy shit what must i do to see these :-)

Some of you might enjoy this Strong Songs podcast episode

https://strongsongspodcast.com/blogs/episodes/s08e09-once-in-a-lifetime-by-talking-heads

I believe Hamilton discusses both with care, but ultimately comes out as a partisan of the live version.

I do not always like the way he talks about drumming, but it is a pretty thorough dissection. There is discussion of Eno's disagreement about the 1, but I don't know that it's really settled.

i dimly recalled the disagreement some people have about the one shifting, i had forgotten this, looking it up ten years ago there was a new yorker profile with sasha fj on eno that discusses eno wanting the chorus to start in between the bass riff (on the three) rather than on the riff the way the verse is because that’s where he heard the one on the original groove. as a bass player the idea of this song having a shifting count is absurd to me because the bass and drums don’t change on the chorus at all, but i can squint my ears and hear the ambiguity fresh.

it’s instructive to listen to the instrumental demo of lifetime, “right start”. here the chorus section has a tasty plinky guitar riff that starts a bit off the beat, but not a full two beats off. so i can imagine eno hearing that offbeat and getting excited and wanting to push things further off…

that “right start” chorus reminded me of the soaring mother whale eyeless middle section (“in my town there is a raincoat…”). and indeed, you can sing “letting the days go by” during the break around 2:20. i wonder if i will be able to hear mother whale the same way again.

https://www.npr.org/2000/03/27/1072131/once-in-a-lifetime

~4:10 in this old interview has eno & the interviewer explain the rhythmic disagreement - he heard it as a reggae style groove originally

that's also separate to the way the emphasis sort of shifts between the chorus & verse thanks to that guitar riff, even as the groove remains steady - in some transcriptions of it that shift the start of the bar back & forward an eighth note between the verse & chorus

omg you fucking needs move on

Let's talk about "Memories Can't Wait."

*nerds

getting chills of horror imagining a reggae arrangement of lifetime, ugh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twfug8nRAbM

well on that note

this is some tom tom club collaborator's reggae talking heads cover band

Nerds chastised on Talking Heads thread?!?

The increasing wooziness and craziness of "Memories Can't Wait" is so awesome!

Sorry, Alfred, I love the discussion about the Once in a Lifetime, even if I'm not technical enough to follow it all.

alfred again with casual disdain for listening to music and a mean-spirited desire to control the narrative at all times.

That's me, casual disdainfully posting. Besos!

Memories Can't Wait has that same crazy transition between takes that PIL's "Memories" and This Heat's "Makeshift Swahili" have, of course it's an all time fave.

I think the entire point of OIAL is that it's an ambiguous shifting studio creation that can't be replicated, see the details about the AKS settings above

That NPR clip was interesting, sounds like Eno knew he heard it differently than the band, and getting some of them to hear it his way was one of his many ideas(tm). They don't all work out, but apparently he did actually write the vocal melody, so I guess he can hear it however he wants (even if the band disagrees).

xxp, The closing track of Fear Of Music, "Drugs", is also woozy and disorienting, but in an even stranger way that still seems vanguard today

At some point someone (I think on this board) uploaded ecnoniaemitefil.mp3, just the track played backwards. I can't find it now but I recommend checking it out if you can engineer your own.

oial demands an anti-boomer answer track, but it is likely impossible to match tho

Anyway: "Mind" is one of TH's best and no one talks about it enough.

xpost that StrongSongs pod on Once in a Lifetime was excellent, thanks for the rec

tbat strongsongs is really great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNTWkkxyg8o

XP to way way way up above, mention of the lineup that Talking Heads had when they played in Tampa Florida of all 'nowhere' places in 1982 (?) and discussion of whether or not tha band would have deigned to play in such a place, along with what the lineup would have been, apparently this is answered in what is said to be a clipping from the Tampa Tribune by a friend of a FB friend --- they played at Curtis Hixon hall in Downtown Tampa (where I saw King Crimson with Robin Trower co-billed in 1974!) and the lineup is said to have been Byrne, Weymouth, Franz, Harrison, Dolette McDonald, Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, and Steve Scales --- no idea if this image will show up below but if it does, it's from a FB page of a friend of a friend of a friend (and if the scan does appear, the heavy circlings have nothing to do with Talking Heads but with the band that opened for them, a local band that was the reason that the person posted it on FB (because somebody they knew was a member of the opening band.)

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10166180558496202&set=pcb.1430713085347808

Nope (above promised image) but basically, it's just a newspaper clipping with no photos, although a couple of amusing interview answers from Harrisson, Byrne, and Frantz. I'll try it this way, but that's the gist of it (the lineup listed in the previous post)

https://imgur.com/a/H9HfCSY

No pix, but it happened! heheheh!