The 1980 Talking Heads album David Byrne could never understand: “Some of my choices don’t make sense”
For an album that was considered to be his band’s magnum opus, you could see how David Byrne could be pressed into being a bit more profound about Remain in Light than he is.
But the reality? He doesn’t know what it means, doesn’t understand his own work, and has to wait for other people to make up an analysis for him to blindly go along with it. The 1980 record was widely considered to be the greatest in the Talking Heads canon, but was it just a load of nonsense?
Well, that might be taking things too far. The whole point was that Byrne’s stream of consciousness lyrics were an impossible code to crack for anyone who heard them, not least, apparently, even the man who wrote them. There could be a whole tangent discussion on hidden meanings and subliminal messages, but really, the conclusion was that there was none.
“I don’t completely understand what I’ve done,” Byrne was forced to later admit. After carving out Remain in Light to within an inch of its life, spending hours painstakingly building the lyrics, recording sounds, and taking samples, he truly didn’t have much to say for the experience. It was almost as though the album had become a beast that was bigger than even his wildest imagination.
It all links into the guise of Byrne being a bit like the mad professor, chaining theories and creating ideas that may seem genius on the outside, but while having no idea where they would lead. “I have definite ideas about which phrase is right for a line and which is not, but I couldn’t tell why,” he mused, perhaps unhelpfully.
Adding, “Some of my choices don’t make sense in any logical way, I just have an intuitive sense about them. Only later, after the critics have explained it all to me or enough time has gone by, do I have a general idea of what I was trying to say.”
Hearing these words come straight from what is openly considered to be his neurodiverse brain, this says a lot about the thought process that went into that time. To all intents and purposes, Byrne’s mind was like a rollercoaster, picking up flashes of ideas and snatches of lyrics along the way, but never stopping to breathe and constantly waiting to go round the loop-de-loop.
It sounds exhausting even having to think about it, never mind having to live it and subsequently justify it. At the end of the day, how do you explain your own whirling brain to someone who doesn’t understand what that feels like, let alone an entire world? Yes, Remain in Light was a magnum opus, but mainly because it was an untamable, roaming being.
In some ways, it must have been quite terrifying to see the album go on to receive the lavish critical reception that it did. That would have come with the slow realisation that the band would then be made to pore over every song, lyric, and beat to define a meaning for the masses. But instead, they did the smart thing, and left it up to the people.
Because of that, Remain in Light became an album that belonged to the world as much as it did Byrne or any member of the Talking Heads. It was a muse to attach any kind of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and even fleeting notions to, wherever it felt appropriate. In many ways, they gifted a canvas for everyone else to paint.
