The Talking Heads Appreciation Thread
RAJ
tenacious local 7,782 Posts
Can't stop playing this album.... sooo good:
Weird to hear how much today's indie bands sound like these guys.
Post Talking Heads tunes, you feel...
Weird to hear how much today's indie bands sound like these guys.
Post Talking Heads tunes, you feel...
Comments
Best concert ever IMO.
True Stories is a pretty cool movie though, I'll give him that.
When i moved into my current place last year and was unpacking, I came across my woodbox vaporizor that I forgot I had and decided to try it out again for the first time in 3 years. What ended up happening was that I was not able to move off of my floor for over 45 minutes. Luckily I had started this album prior to my bad decision and was able to really, really, really enjoy it to the point that i was borderline tripping
I grew up with the Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club. My mom was a huge fan and was in some similar sounding bands. After years of searching, she recently found an old 45 of her band in the attic... I'll have to post a rip. Very Talking Heads ish.
Only somewhat related, but I like to remind all the SF hipsters that look at me funny because I wear collared shirts that I'm OG Mission (okay, not really)... I was conceived in a one bedroom apartment on Valencia and 24th where my mom lived with 6 other punk rockers. Her band would play this spot Mabuhay Gardens that was pretty legendary at that time. Everyone was broke, so with the $5 entry fee you'd get a 6 pack of beer and a loaf of bread. I love hearing stories about SF back then because it totally sucks now. Every time I hear the Talking Heads or Tom Tom Club, I immediately think of my mom as a 20 year old punk with purple hair
Great band.
This isn't a Talking Heads album, but I love this album:
By far my favorite album.
Great song.
The first five studio albums are magnificent, with at least two of them - Fear Of Music and Remain In Light - being absolute landmark records of the period. The last three have some great songs between them, but for me they suffer from being too Byrne-dominated overall. I'm not someone who's ever really subscribed to the idea that they were Byrne's band (or Byrne/Eno's, for that matter). Their most enduring innovations came from the rhythm section, and for the best of his solo/extra-curricular work while the band was still active, it was often the players Byrne brought in that were responsible for a lot of the music's dynamism. Generally, his solo stuff has followed a pattern of being interesting in a beard-strokey kind of way rather than in a "wow, that new David Byrne record is really something else" kind of way. Equally, great as things like Genius Of Love and, in fact, quite a bit of the Tom Tom Club material is, they're just as much proof that Talking Heads as a band were greater than the sum of their individual parts.
I'd also add David Byrne's "The Catherine Wheel" album/soundtrack to any list of albums worth checking if you like Talking Heads. Shades of "Remain In Light" and songs that would later appear in "Stop Making Sense". It always seems to get overlooked in favour of his Brian Eno collabaration (reasonably enough, I suppose, since Eno is more likely to draw people's attention than some art/dance album).
As for Talking Heads, I used to like slipping "Pull Up The Roots" or "Girlfriend is Better" into more house-y sets.
The version of Psycho Killer from Stop making Sense would somehow always get played at our regular bar in college. Many a good times were had to the sound of the Talking Heads. Their music has aged well through the years, they still sound so fresh and earnest.
Taking Manhattan (By Strategy)
it's the talking heads song that you're not supposed to love, but it's the one that means the most to me.