david byrne Archives - Vinyl From The Vault

Talking Heads “Little Creatures”

sfilzen — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 21:41:40 +0000

Talking Heads “Little Creatures” 1985. Today, February 21st, is Talking Heads guitarist and keyboardist Jerry Harrison’s 70th birthday (b. 1949). Harrison is originally from Milwaukee (our home) and this LP originally resided at WKTI, a radio station here that used to play Top 40 hits but now plays country music, I think.

Little Creatures was Talking Heads’ 6th studio LP and while still kinda new wave/post punk, incorporates world music and Americana elements. It hit #20 on the US album charts and went to #10 in the UK. Talking Heads released three singles from the album: “The Lady Don’t Mind,” “Road to Nowhere” and “And She Was.” I haven’t listened to this album in forever, but those songs are still so great! I’m not sure if “The Lady Don’t Mind” charted but “Road to Nowhere” was pretty popular (and got a lot of airtime on MTV if I remember correctly, that image of David Byrne weirdly running burned into my brain) and went to #25 on the US Mainstream Rock chart and to #6 in the UK. “And She Was” is so exuberant! Apparently it’s about a hippie girl David Byrne used to know who tripped out on acid and described feeling like she was flying. The track went to #54 on the US singles chart and to #17 in the UK. I feel like “Stay Up Late” was also a single – it has its own official video – but I’m not totally sure about that one.

Allmusic says about Little Creatures “Talking Heads’ most immediately accessible album, Little Creatures eschewed the pattern of recent Heads albums, in which instrumental tracks had been worked up from riffs and grooves, after which David Byrne improvised melodies and lyrics. The songs on Little Creatures, most of which were credited to Byrne alone (with the band credited only with arrangements) sounded like they’d been written as songs. Perhaps as one result, the band had been streamlined, with extra musicians used only for specific effects rather than playing along as an ensemble. Byrne, who was singing in his natural range for once, frequently was augmented with backup singers. The overall result: ear candy. Little Creatures was a pop album, and an accomplished one, by a band that knew what it was doing…Little Creatures was, in a sense, Talking Heads lite. It was hard to think of this as the same band that produced “Psycho Killer.” But for the band’s expanding audience, who made this their second platinum album, that was okay. And their popularity was being accomplished with no diminution in their creativity.”

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Talking Heads “Speaking in Tongues”

sfilzen — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 20:30:16 +0000

Talking Heads “Speaking in Tongues” released 35 years ago today, June 1st, 1983. Their fifth studio release, Speaking in Tongues was their most successful to that point, propelled by their only Top 10 hit, “Burning Down the House,” which hit #9. “Burning Down the House” – like the rest of Speaking in Tongues (which Rolling Stone’s David Fricke called “the album that finally obliterates the thin line separating arty white pop music and deep black funk”) – is both new wavey and seriously funky. The story goes that Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz had just seen a Parliament-Funkadelic concert at Madison Square Garden and at band rehearsal kept yelling “Burn down the house!” – a P-Funk audience chant, inspiring David Byrne to write the lyrics. I loved “Burning Down the House;” MTV had it on heavy rotation so I saw the video about a million times during the summer of ‘83. The rest of the art-funk album is super-groovy, too. I especially love “Girlfriend is Better” (the lyrics from that track supplied the title for Talking Heads’ concert film Stop Making Sense, a truly iconic 80′s moment for oversized suits and shoulders), the deep swampy beat of “Swamp,” the hypnotic post-punk vibe on “Pull Up the Roots” and “This Must Be the Place (Native Melody).”

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The B-52′s “Mesopotamia”

sfilzen — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 22:56:48 +0000

The B-52′s “Mesopotamia” 1982. 6 song EP. Today, February 28th, is B-52 singer Cindy Wilson’s 60th birthday (b. 1957). Mesopotamia is the result of the band’s short-lived collaboration with Talking Heads’ David Byrne; the recording session was supposed to have resulted in The B-52′s third full-length release but there were “conflicts over musical direction.” Byrne’s thumbprints are all over Mesopotamia, from the artwork to the more experimental, less 60′s dance-n-surf party fun. The sound is more layered and complex than their previous recordings and the production more polished, less raw. But the quirky sense of humor that defines The B-52′s just has a hard time shining through on Mesopotamia. “Throw That Beat in the Garbage Can,” sung in the Sprechgesang style by Fred Schneider, is beyond quirky, delving into the land of just weird with all of the Byrnesque musical horn, synth and rhythm effects. I love David Byrne but the artistic visions just didn’t mesh. “Loveland” is one of the stronger recordings, Cindy Wilson’s vocals soaring and beautiful over a grooving, danceable beat.

I remember seeing many copies of Mesopotamia in the mid-80′s at used record stores. The EP did moderately well, reaching #35 on the US album charts and #18 in the UK, but I think a lot of B-52 fans traded it in after a few listens. The band released three double A-side singles from the record, which resulted in the entire EP being available in single format, which seems utterly bizarre.

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Talking Heads “77″

sfilzen — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 15:01:33 +0000

Talking Heads “77″ released on this date, September 16, 1977. The single “Psycho Killer,” one of the most iconic Talking Heads songs, reached #92 on the US charts in 1978; Allmusic describes it as a “deceptively funky new wave/no wave song … [with] an insistent rhythm, and one of the most memorable, driving basslines in rock & roll.“ Talking Heads started performing this song live as a ballad sung from a killer’s perspective in the band’s first iteration as The Artistic in ‘74. David Byrne described his inspiration as “imagining Alice Cooper doing a Randy Newman-type ballad. Both the Joker and Hannibal Lecter were much more fascinating than the good guys. Everybody sort of roots for the bad guys in movies.”

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