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.”