About the Album
This “is not only a perfect entry point for Talking Heads’ pristine discography, but it’s also their magnum opus.” PM “Talking Heads were always bursting with nervous energy and interesting ideas,” BL but their fourth album offered an adventurous leap forward. “Fans were pleasantly stunned to hear Remain in Light,” AZ “a fuller, funkier sound nobody imagined they had in them.” AZ This showed that “Talking Heads were connecting with an audience ready to follow their musical evolution” AM which was “clear-eyed, detached, almost mystically optimistic.” RC This was “head music…with an unexpected warmth, and deep, deep soul.” VH1
It “is a strangely beautiful album, a groundbreaking work.” CM PopMatters’ Eric Klinger asserts that the album is “100% impossible to dislike.” CB His cohort, Jason Mendelsohn says “there are quite a few ‘music fans’ who might find the obtuse lyrical content and incessant, droning, poly-rhythmic nature of this album to be baffling. But then these people are morons.” CB This “hypnotic and haunting…polyrhythmic art-rock odyssey is like the soundtrack to the weirdest (and funkiest) sci-fi film never made.” EW’12
David Byrne
“The album can be genuinely disorienting; there are so many layers of sound, insistent percussion…and the juxtaposition between Byrne’s voice and Nona Hendryx’s.” CB “Who knew that geeky former art student had this much soul?” BL “It took the whitest guy in existence to validate funk as an intellectual endeavor. David Byrne and co. freed Caucasian minds that George Clinton had been trying to unshackle for years.” VB This is “intellectual dance music, inclusively made for the hips and the head.” CM
The “animated David Byrne” CL “chanted and sang his typically disconnected lyrics” AM which took the listener “out of your standard pop expectations” CB and suggested “just enough to create a definite image and occasionally even an interesting sociological point, but never annoying or heavy-handed.” JA
“David Byrne might be the last true genius in music experimentation…Even if you don’t understand the Talking Heads, which you will (it just…hits you), you can’t help but appreciate it. Why? Because you appreciate something that’s unique, original, and, above all, bizarre.” CQ
Quintessential New Wave/Art-Rock/World Music
This was an album “where new wave and African music found a startling union.” CM The album was a “New Wave watershed” 500 and “what many critics justly consider to be a quintessential snapshot of world music.” CQ It was an “intersection of rock and electronic dance nearly twenty years before anyone else could come close to matching it.” CB “New Wave had far more to it than just being those few years after punk when everyone danced a little better. And from that era” SL Remain in Light “serves as a timeless signpost of a period when artists were not only unafraid to experiment within the idiom of the pop song; they were practically expected to.” SL
“They’d been the technocrats of New York punk, more dada than danger” CM but now “chose to move in a completely different direction from the dying punk scene, producing an album more influenced by R & B and African rhythms than by the Ramones.” RV Talking Heads “took what was being increasingly regarded as a generally cerebral extension of punk and turned it into something far more global in musical and lyrical scope.” SL This may be “the best art-rock album ever.” ZG
The Band
The group was “held together musically by a mathematically precise rhythm section of Tina Weymouth (bass) and Chris Frantz (drums)” CL and rounded out by guitarist Jerry Harrison. Things were not idyllic as the band prepped for recording. Frantz and Weymouth considered leaving because of Byrne’s controlling ways. CQ Byrne had openly considered firing Weymouth RS and Byrne wasn’t that interested in recording with the band again.
However, Frantz and Weymouth had made a trip to Jamaica and their discovery of “new avenues of percussion” CQ provided some revitalization. When they started jamming together, “songs started materializing before their eyes.” RS By “adding horns and guest performers to their intellectually based muse” CL the group “married their new-wave idiosyncrasies” BL of “what they already did well – those sharp guitar spikes and pummeling up-and-down backbeats – ” TM “to Afro-funk beats and grooves that drew on everything from James Brown to Fela Kuti to disco.” BL
Frantz said, “We were interested in creating sounds that would take us deeper and far beyond what people had come to expect from us.” RS Byrne said they were listening to “African pop music…like Fela Kuti and King Sunny Adé…But we didn’t set out to imitate those…We didn’t get it quite right, but in missing, we ended up with something new.” RS Because the album “takes its cues from African music, the steady groove that keeps winding along becomes something hypnotic.” CB Suddenly “the avant-punk avatars became polyrhythmic pop magicians.” 500
The Recording Process
“The recording behind this album reads like a James Bond film gone overbudget.” CQ The band started recording in July 1980 at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, TB then went to New York City, and eventually Los Angeles. Byrne headed to Africa at one point to confront “a case of writer’s block with a portable tape player and some nonsensical phonetics.” CQ
“The jarring variation among the songs (side one is very danceable, much of side two is quite ambient) may make this the sort of thing to listen to in shifts – if you’re in the mood for the upbeat ‘Crosseyed and Painless,’ the moody atmospherics of ‘The Overload’ might be hard to take, and vice versa – but the performance and feel of the album is consistently compelling throughout the disc.” PK
Guest performers were brought in as well, including Nona Hendryx as a backing vocalist, Jon Hassell on trumpet, and guitarist Adrian Belew, who’d worked with Frank Zappa and David Bowie.
Brian Eno
They also owed their newly developed sound to “state of the art equipment, some of which created new sonic environments and platforms to explore in.” CQ Credit also goes to “the studied adventurousness” 500 of Brian Eno as producer, performer, and co-writer of all eight tracks on the album. He also introduced sampling and loops of chords. Eno had worked earlier on some of David Bowie’s records, but the Talking Heads “are an even better foil for him” JA as they go for “full-blown sound collages.” JA
The band “turned over near-total control to Eno,” PK who “helped guide the band's growing sound, creating a menagerie of guitar noise, funky beats and electronically-altered trumpets,” RV “resulting in some polyrhythmic world music dance tunes, ambient weirdness, and the best song of their career (‘Once in a Lifetime’). The production is amazing (this is more worthy of headphones than most Pink Floyd discs), and the musicianship is outstanding.” PK
The songs “started life as lengthy, percussive, full-band jams; the tapes of these performances were manually sliced up and reconfigured as looped grooves and then padded out with additional instrumentation and Byrne’s expansive vocal melodies.” TB “Eno’s formula includes choppy funk bass, weird synth noises, dense layers of polyrhythmic percussion, and repetitive song structures that after a while lull the listener into a near trance.” JA His work “nudges this record from straight, upbeat rock, to the borderlands of electronica.” CB
The Songs
Here are insights about individual songs.
“Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)”
“From the mystical, opening notes of Born Under Punches, it’s clear that virtually everything about the Talking Heads’ enterprise is different. Less spastic. More streamlined. Reborn as a groove machine with libido-enhancing powers, the rhythm section…kicks out a cryptic code that’s reinforced by the overlapping rhythm guitar circuits of Jerry Harrison and…Belew.” TM His “Stratocaster sounds more like a malfunctioning computer on the Starship Enterprise than any stringed instrument.” SL
“The pulse becomes so strong, it sweeps even the congenitally uptight Byrne into the dance.” TM The song “percolates along nicely, but what draws you into its world is the carnival barker/ranting street preacher persona that seems to take Byrne over.” CB
“Crosseyed and Painless”
“Born Under Punches” and the next two songs “are long, layered, full-body dance parties, with incessantly repeated phrases (musical and lyrical), and increasingly catchy melodic hooks that won’t let go for days.” AZ On “the dreamy, energetic Crosseyed and Painless,” Byrne even raps, showing how the band “truly had their fingers on the metronomic pulse of modern culture.” SL
“The Great Curve”
Belew’s wacky guitar solo on The Great Curve “swoops, careens, and glides like a thrill-seeking pilot at an air show.” SL This was a “Hendrix-on-the-moon guitar solo. Fractured, half-chanted lyrics. David Byrne had ditched his early, mannerist quirkiness for something even stranger, a radical alienation that might’ve appeared to any adolescent.” VH1 “Like many of the tracks collected here, the world looks off-kilter or redrawn after the song has been your soundtrack.” CM
“Once in a Lifetime”
“The exquisite Once in a Lifetime” CL is “the greatest song Byrne will ever write.” RC The single flopped initially, but “a striking video” AM featuring the “sweaty, nervous David Byrne twitching and jerking against that stark white background” CB “introduced Talking Heads to a generation of MTV viewers.” RS
Lyrics like “You may ask yourself” and “How did I get here?” “resmembes more an evangelist’s rant than a pop lyric.” SL Byrne said they “struck a nerve with people and became very memorable.” RS The song did scrape the bottom of the charts after a live version was released in support of their 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense.
Musically, it is “framed by the simplest of grooves (Weymouth’s two-note bass line and Frantz’s fairly funky drum loop) as well as layer upon layer of Harrison’s burbling keyboard, skitch-skitch rhythm guitar, and odd, random noises.” SL It “suggests a pan-international sound without expressing it aurally. Post-modern alienation was never so danceable.” CL The song is “defined by the clipped, minimal bassline and keyboard shimmer.” CM
“Houses in Motion”/“Seen and Not Seen”
Then there are “the bizarre horn arrangement” JA and “angular shuffle of Houses in Motion” VH1 followed by “the creepy, inscrutable recitative Seen and Not Seen.” VH1 The latter “foretells modern celebrity culture’s addictive hold on the public.” CM
“Listening Wind”
“On Listening Wind, trademark ’80s tones coagulate with what sounds like spirits and animals in a far off jungle, all while Byrne croons, ‘He has the knowledge of the wind to guide him…on.’ It’s obscure on paper, but within the world they create, it makes absolute sense.” CQ “Socio-political streams of consciousness seem to exist within the lyrics…depicting the efforts of a mail bomber, driven to his actions by ‘The wind in my heart/The dust in my head.’” SL
“The Overload”
And who can ignore album closer The Overload? With its ominous beat and foreboding lyrics,” CQ the “spooked crawl” VH1 of the “Eno-like droner” AZ “resonates well these days, in a time where we all complain about how ‘the center is missing.’” CQ
Notes: A CD reissue added the unfinished outtakes “Fela’s Riff,” “Unison,” “Double Groove,” and “Right Start.”
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