“I think the best love songs are simple. They’re simple because love isn’t, simple because we need to dream a little. Complexity, ambiguity, doubt—they can have their place in novels or in the movies. A love song lets you live in the fantasy of the absolute; maybe that’s also why they last only a couple of minutes. And that’s why we carry them with us, play and replay them until they wear out like old clothes. They stand for too much. I have many songs that mark the time of particular relationships, both their highs and the lows of their dissolution. I’ve played songs on repeat enough to drive people crazy, and I’ve locked myself in my room to listen to late-period Billie Holiday with the lights off. But I have only one renewable love song, which I’ve brought with me through all my relationships: the Talking Heads’ ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’ …”
The Paris Review
W – “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” 1983
YouTube: Naive Melody (This Must Be The Place)
Tag: Talking Heads
More Songs About Buildings and Food – Talking Heads (1978)
“On July 14, 1978, Talking Heads released their second album, ‘More Songs About Buildings and Food,’ a backwards exorcism of frozen-brittle guitars, smeared textures and super-ecstatic vocals. The record brought forth an essential darkness and didn’t try to extinguish it. These were songs about emotions that lurk, about the secret part of ourselves that knows people can see right through us on buses, planes and subways, all sung by a disjointed, ferocious, manic, shivering guy named David Byrne. It was a kind of State of the Union address, examining the nation’s health from a dozen different angles, including the sky. Now, almost 25 years later, what could be more relevant than songs about buildings and food and love and rage and sorrow and hope and fear? Today, VH1 specials document the Heads’ part in the CBGB years, centered on the downtown Manhattan club where they accompanied the Ramones, Blondie and others in a New York minute that inaugurated American punk. But the Heads were never really punk. For one thing, they looked like their Izod alligators should be wearing them. They were art-school geeks less given to slam-dancing than Polaroid experiments. …”
salon
W – More Songs About Buildings and Food
YouTube: More Songs About Buildings and Food (full album) 15 videos
A Conservative Impulse in the New Rock Underground
“August 18, 1975: Arabian swelter, and with the air-conditioning broken, CBGB resembled some abattoir of a kitchen in which a bucket of ice is placed in front of a fan to cool the room off. To no avail of course, and the heat had perspiration glissading down the curve of one’s back, yeah, and the cruel heat also burned away any sense of glamour. After all, CBGB’s Bowery and Bleecker location is not the garden spot of lower Manhattan, and the bar itself is an uneasy oasis. On the left, where the couples are, tables; on the right, where the stragglers, drinkers, and the love-seekers are, a long bar; between the two, a high double-backed ladder, which, when the room is really crowded, offers the best view. … Now consider the assembly-line presentation of bands with resonant names like Movies, Tuff Darts, Blondie, Stagger Lee, the Heartbreakers, Mike de Ville, Dancer, the Shirts, Bananas, Talking Heads, Johnny’s Dance Band, and Television; consider that some nights as many as six bands perform, and it isn’t hard to comprehend someone declining to sit through a long evening. …”
Voice
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – Brian Eno / David Byrne (1981)
“My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a 1981 album by Brian Eno and David Byrne, titled after Amos Tutuola‘s 1954 novel of the same name. … The ‘found objects‘ credited to Eno and Byrne were common objects used mostly as percussion. In the notes for the 2006 expanded edition of the album, Byrne writes that they would often use a normal drum kit, but with a cardboard box replacing the bass drum, or a frying pan replacing the snare drum; this would blend the familiar drum sound with unusual percussive noises. Rather than conventional pop or rock singing, most of the vocals are sampled from other sources, such as commercial recordings of Arabic singers, radio disc jockeys, and an exorcist. Musicians had previously used similar sampling techniques, but critic Dave Simpson declares it had never before been used ‘to such cataclysmic effect’ as on My Life. …”
Wikipedia
reDiscover Brian Eno And David Byrne’s ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’ (Audio)
iTunes
YouTube – America is waiting (Live), Home, Strange Overtones, Very Very Hungry (bootleg), Les Hombres Ne Le Sauront Jamals, The Jezebel Spirit (bootleg)
YouTube: My life in the bush of ghosts (Full album) 11 videos
1976 Film Blank Generation Documents CBGB Scene with Patti Smith, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie & More
“Fans of bratty New York punk-turned-serious writer Richard Hell or schlocky German horror director Ulli Lommel or—why not—both, will likely know of Lommel’s 1980 Blank Generation, a film unremarkable except for its casting of Hell and his excellent Voidoids as feature players. (Their debut 1977 album and single are also called Blank Generation.) The movie, as a reviewer puts it, ‘seems as if each member of the production was under the impression they were working on a different film than the rest of their collaborators…. You can’t help but think that something more watchable could be produced out of the raw footage with a good editor.’ One might approach an earlier film, also called Blank Generation—the raw 1976 documentary about the budding New York punk scene above—with similar expectations of coherent production and narrative clarity. But this would be mistaken. …”
Open Curture (Video)
W – The Blank Generation
Voice: Punk Icon Richard Hell Looks Back at “Blank Generation” Forty Years Later
Talking Heads: 77 – Talking Heads (1977)
“Though they were the most highly touted new wave band to emerge from the CBGB’s scene in New York, it was not clear at first whether Talking Heads‘ Lower East Side art rock approach could make the subway ride to the midtown pop mainstream successfully. The leadoff track of the debut album, Talking Heads: 77, ‘Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town,’ was a pop song that emphasized the group’s unlikely roots in late-’60s bubblegum, Motown, and Caribbean music. But the ‘Uh-Oh’ gave away the group’s game early, with its nervous, disconnected lyrics and David Byrne‘s strained voice. All pretenses of normality were abandoned by the second track, as Talking Heads finally started to sound on record the way they did downtown: the staggered rhythms and sudden tempo changes, the odd guitar tunings and rhythmic, single-note patterns, the non-rhyming, non-linear lyrics that came across like odd remarks overheard from a psychiatrist’s couch, and that voice, singing above its normal range, its falsetto leaps and strangled cries resembling a madman trying desperately to sound normal. Talking Heads threw you off balance, but grabbed your attention with a sound that seemed alternately threatening and goofy. The music was undeniably catchy, even at its most ominous, especially on ‘Psycho Killer,’ Byrne’s supreme statement of demented purpose. Amazingly, that song made the singles chart for a few weeks, evidence of the group’s quirky appeal, but the album was not a big hit, and it remained unclear whether Talking Heads spoke only the secret language of the urban arts types or whether that could be translated into the more common tongue of hip pop culture. In any case, they had succeeded as artists, using existing elements in an unusual combination to create something new that still managed to be oddly familiar. And that made Talking Heads: 77 a landmark album. ”
allmusic (Audio)
Albums of Our Lives: Talking Heads’s Talking Heads: 77 (Video)
W – Talking Heads: 77
Spotify, iTunes
YouTube: Talking Heads: 77 (5.1 Downmix) 46:16
YouTube: Talking Heads 77 (Deluxe Version) 16 videos
YouTube: Psycho Killer (Live)
Punk Scrawled Artist 