Trivia / Talking Heads

• Better Export for You:
  • The initial international CD release of Little Creatures adds "The Lady Don't Mind (Extended Mix)" to the end of the album as a bonus track.
  • The 2005 remasters of the band's catalog were released in the US on DualDisc, an experimental hybrid format that consisted of a Compact Disc layer on one side and a DVD layer on the other. While ambitious, the format was known for being incompatible with a number of CD players thanks to the CD side being thinner than a standard CD. The international releases of the remasters, meanwhile, split the two sides across a regular CD and a regular DVD, thus alleviating the compatibility issues.
• Black Sheep Hit: "Wild Wild Life" was a more straightforward rock song than the band was usually known for.
• Breakthrough Hit: Critical darlings from the get-go, their cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" on More Songs About Buildings and Food was their first single to reach the Top 40.
• Breakup Breakout: David Byrne has had a successful solo career since the band's breakup, while the other members have kept a lower profile. Jerry Harrison has worked as a Record Producer, notably working with Live, Crash Test Dummies and The String Cheese Incident, among others. Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz have continued with the Tom Tom Club.
• Bury Your Art: The band swiftly cast the Byrne-free reunion album No Talking, Just Head into Canon Discontinuity after its critical and commercial failure, and refused to re-release or even discuss it for over two decades. It would eventually surface on streaming services in 2018 and see a CD reissue in Europe in 2020. In an interview promoting his 2020 memoir Remain in Love, drummer Chris Frantz stated that the album's making is still a raw wound for the band members, to the extent where the book deliberately omits it.
• Channel Hop: While they consistently stayed on Sire Records under the Warner Music Group umbrella in their native US, international distribution of Talking Heads' music was a different matter.
  • In Europe, the band were originally signed to Philips Records, Sire's European distributor at the time. When Warner purchased Sire in 1978, Talking Heads were moved there in Europe as well, allowing Sire to distribute their work worldwide.
  • From the soundtrack to Stop Making Sense onward, the band switched from Sire Records to EMI outside the U.S. and Canada, while remaining with Sire in North America.
  • After the sale of EMI, the band's international rights moved to former subsidiary Parlophone Records; as Parlophone were bought out by WMG, this brought Talking Heads back to them worldwide after nearly 30 years.
• Chart Displacement: Out of their three Top 40 hits, only "Burning Down the House" is among their best-known, with "Take Me to the River" and "Wild Wild Life" certainly not being on the eschelon of the barely charting "Psycho Killer" (#92) and "Once in a Lifetime" (#103, though a live version later peaked at #91).
• Colbert Bump:
  • Fans of The Walking Dead found themselves listening to more and more songs by Talking Heads after the Season 10 episode "A Certain Doom" featured the song "Burning Down the House".
  • Even with it being the opening track on Fear of Music, "I Zimbra" is one of Talking Heads' more niche songs to the mainstream. So, when Spider-Man: No Way Home featured it as the opening track to the movie, the song exploded in popularity, with many YouTube uploads attributing the song to the film.
• Contractual Obligation Project: Chris Frantz claimed that the prospect of this was Byrne's motivation for dissolving the band in his book, Remain in Love. Under the band's record contract, Byrne would have been expected to continue to work on Talking Heads albums while the band was still officially together, so Byrne simply broke up the band to concentrate on his solo career. Considering Byrne's Creative Differences with the rest of his bandmates, it likely would've been difficult for them to continue anyways, and given his contract it's likely that he wouldn't have been able to just quit, thus limiting his choices to either dissolving the band or dragging it out until it inevitably collapsed.
• Creator Backlash:
  • The band was dissatisfied with the production on Talking Heads: 77 due to producer Tony Bongiovi's Executive Meddling trying to making them into a mainstream pop band.
  • Byrne himself disowned True Stories thanks to it being arm-twisted out of the band by Warner Bros. and, in his eyes, depriving the songs of their proper context from the film.
  • The band members who worked on No Talking, Just Head quickly disowned the project after it bombed, and are reluctant to mention it to this day; Chris Frantz notably omits it from his memoir for that reason.
• Creator Breakdown: The Darker and Edgier tone of Fear of Music and Remain in Light stemmed from Byrne suffering from burnout as a result of Talking Heads' constant touring and performing. While it thankfully didn't cause any worse issues, it did impact both Talking Heads' artistic output and Byrne's own solo work prior to Talking Heads stopping touring in 1984.
• Creator Couple: Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz have been married since 1977.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Jerry Harrison named "Love → Building on Fire" as one of his favorite songs by the band to play live, despite the fact that it was their only song released before he joined the band.
• Creative Differences: Part of the reason the band never reformed. The other part is the other band members' personal issues with David Byrne, with the relationship between Tina Weymouth and Byrne appearing to be the most acrimonious. Weymouth has been the most vocal about her annoyance with Byrne's domination of the band.
• Denial of Digital Distribution: No Talking, Just Head was absent from streaming services until 2018 due to its poor reception from fans, critics, and the involved band members.
• Enforced Method Acting: Byrne's creepy breathless singing on "Drugs" was caused by him running on the spot while he was doing the vocals.
• He Also Did: Chris Frantz played on Robert Palmer's "Looking for Clues" during the recording of Remain in Light. Palmer returned the favor by playing percussion on that album.
• Hostility on the Set: Tina Weymouth has been the most vocal of the band's other members about her resentment of David Byrne's domination of the band and of the band's legacy.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • While they're still available digitally, the 2005 and 2006 remasters of the band's catalog by Jerry Harrison & Andy Zax haven't been in-print on a physical format since 2009; since then, whenever a new CD copy of a Talking Heads studio album shows up on the store shelf, it's guaranteed to be a re-pressing of a CD release from the 80's. This is notable because it's extremely unusual for something like this to happen to a band's back-catalog. Typically, it's the older releases that go out of print, with the most recent remasters being the ones that stick around.
  • As a result of its critical and commercial failure and poor reception among fans, No Talking, Just Head was never reissued until 2020, when Music on CD picked up the distribution rights to it. Even then, releases are limited to continental Europe like the rest of the label's catalog, so anyone outside of that region is limited to either imports or whatever secondhand copies of the original 1996 release are still floating around.
• Reality Subtext: "Sax and Violins", the band's final song, was written and released in the months leading up to their break-up; much of the lyrics seem to reflect on the band's legacy and the future of the individual members as they each go their separate paths.
• Similarly Named Works: The band has two compilations named Once in a Lifetime. One is a single-disc version of the Greatest Hits Album Sand in the Vaseline for non-U.S. markets, and the other is a Boxed Set.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Lou Reed offered to give Talking Heads a record contract and produce their debut album, but his terms would've granted him full ownership rights to the album. Consequently, they turned him down on the advice of a legal consultant, though still remaining on good terms with him. Fellow Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale also expressed interest in producing them.
  • The band considered supporting True Stories with a tour of drive-in theaters. This would have been the band's first tour since the one supporting Speaking in Tongues captured in Stop Making Sense.
  • Adrian Belew lobbied to be a full member of Talking Heads, but David Byrne declined; Belew went on to front the revived King Crimson instead. One can only wonder if Talking Heads would've gone on past 1991 with Belew, as well as what they would've sounded like post-Remain in Light and how different King Crimson would've been without him.
    • On a related note, at one point Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth considered firing Byrne from the band and replacing him with Belew, as tensions with Byrne had already begun to tank band morale at that point; Belew, however, declined the offer, apparently hoping to work alongside Byrne rather than supplanting him.
  • The band were approached to perform at Live Aid, but turned down the offer due to Byrne being committed to filming True Stories at the time.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Many of the songs on later albums, particularly on Remain in Light, Speaking in Tongues, and Naked, were created from jams in the studio.

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