14. Talking Heads, Little Creatures (1985)

Movies, it turns out, take a long time to make. David Byrne, the frontman of Talking Heads, learned that as he ground his way towards his feature directorial debut. As the band that provided his day job rose in prominence, Byrne took advantage of the personal fame that provided him to pursue all manner of other projects. The success of Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert film brilliantly directed by Jonathan Demme, cracked open the opportunity for Byrne to try out filmmaking. Byrne recruited Stephen Tobolowsky and Beth Henley to help him hash out a screenplay about several eccentric characters he’d cooked up, and he got down to the task of writing original songs for those characters to sing.

At a certain point, Byrne decided he made more songs than he really needed for the movie. As luck would have it, Talking Heads were arguably overdue for a new studio album. As long as the movie was slower getting to the production stage than Byrne expected as someone who was accustomed to setting his own creative pace, he might as well reconvene his bandmates. That might seem like tepid, even misguided motivation for bringing together one of the greatest ensembles of rock ‘n’ roll, but it simply reflected where Byrne’s head was at.

“In the beginning, we were like a family, but eventually, it becomes more like a business, a creative business,” Byrne said at the time. “I kind of wish we could all be as close as we were years ago, and we all to some extent keep struggling to return to that. But, at the same time, I love all these other things that I’m involved in. The ideal would be that the band is one thing that we all do, and that we can all do other things.”

To be fair, Byrne wasn’t the only member of Talking Heads doing other things. Bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz, the married couple in the band, had already put out two full-length albums with side project Tom Tom Club, and multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison had one solo album to his credit by that point and started toying with a sideline as a producer for other acts. Still, there was a sense that Byrne’s extracurriculars were more meaningful and that he was doing the other Talking Heads a little bit of a favor by showing up. That feeling was compounded by Byrne coming into the sessions for what would become Talking Heads’ sixth album, Little Creatures, with a set of songs that were basically fully formed, a marked change from previous instances when the band shaped their new material in a highly collaborative fashion.

Interestingly, Byrne presented his bandmates with a batch of songs that skewed away from the art rock abstractions that largely defined their creative persona to that point. The pieces still weren’t exactly mewling love songs that rhymed “moon” with “June,” but they were musically grounded in discernable folk and Americana influences. The reinvention was less jarring.

 “I’ve gone the long way around and come to accept almost the conventional song structure as a valid way of working,” Byrne told The New York Times.

Conventional certainly didn’t mean boring, especially as played by Talking Heads. Little Creatures opens with the banging brilliance of “And She Was,” which is forceful and soaring, an ideal reflection of its lyrics, which depict a woman levitating through the sky. In its tone and energy, the track has a mirror in “Stay Up Late,” an exuberant paean to the joy of having a baby in the house (“See him drink. From a bottle./ See him eat. From a plate./ Cute. Cute. As a button./ Don’t you want to make him. Stay up late.”) Explorations of established forms of music that weren’t previously all that evident in Talking Heads’ repertoire are present in the deeply embedded country twang of “Creatures of Love” and the vague samba of “The Lady Don’t Mind.” Talking Heads’ earlier genre hopping could be rendered with a certain archness. That’s not the case here. It’s all so earnest as to be a little sweet.

“It has something to do with discovering the unsleaziness of rock ‘n’ roll,” Weymouth explained to The New York Times Magazine at the time.

For the true blue fans, more esoteric songs also show up on Little Creatures. “Walk It Down” is strangely theatrical in its deliberate, jabbing pace, and “Television Man” is jagged and odd (“When the world crashes in into my living room/ Television man made me what I am/ People like to put the television down/ But we are just good friends”). “Give Me Back My Name” is the sort of smooth yet urgent rendering of heady abstractions that was a Talking Heads speciality from the very start (“Some things can never be spoken/ Some things cannot be pronounced/ That word does not exist in any language/ It will never be uttered by a human mouth”).

The album closes with “Road to Nowhere,” a rousing anthem with a nihilistic view. Released as a single, the song become an MTV staple despite bizarrely missing the Billboard Hot 100 altogether. Still, the track had enough cultural presence to help significantly drive sales of the album. Little Creatures moved enough units to earn double platinum status, making it far and away the most commercially successful Talking Heads studio album.

“We never try to guess what the public wants,” Harrison said. “We just try to make our music as good as possible and hope it will be accepted.”

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.