“You don’t defend it”: How Talking Heads found a musical soulmate in Brian Eno
Despite the countless labels attached to Talking Heads, one that few build their analyses around is experimentalism. Whether discussing them in the contexts of rock, new wave, or post-punk funk, the basis for Talking Heads’ excellence always came from their innovative attitude, the kind that threw out the rulebook and said, “Let’s just see what happens when we do this.”
Most of the time, this reached every facet of their artistry, from the words and melodies to the intricate arrangements. This is also what made their genre-blending excellence possible; Talking Heads didn’t just come together to do things everybody else had done time and time again, they wanted to converge sounds that made them feel alive, whether rooted in rock sensibilities or further afield in world music.
From the beginning, a big part of this was operating with different pieces that each brought something to the table. Talking Heads wouldn’t have worked as well had all members been on the same page, as strange as that sounds. But, musically, they each veered in different directions, which made for a richly infused concoction of everything the band became well-known for.
As Tina Weymouth once recalled, the group thrived “because we had this interesting mix of people”. There was Chris Frantz, who “came from the steel town of Pittsburgh and understood that raw Black American sound”; and Weymouth, along with David Byrne and Jerry Harrison, “who had been exposed to a lot of European classical music” at the Rhode Island School of Design. “So when you combine the African-American rhythms with that European melody,” she said, “You get Talking Heads.”
However, having all the appropriate moving parts in the beginning is one thing; another is a producer who understands the operation well enough to push when it’s needed, in a way that services the experimental nature of their core without hindering their progress. For countless reasons, therefore, Brian Eno was as much a dream to Talking Heads as their music was to everybody else, mainly because he just got it.
For many, the right producer can make or break momentum, but with Eno, Talking Heads were not only given space to do what they do best but also had a helping hand that shared their attitude and mindset when it came to trying things out. According to Eno, being experimental in the way that Talking Heads were meant a lot of trial and error and establishing internal failures, which can become arduous, but necessary in discovering greater artistic excellence.
Not only did Eno help Byrne with writer’s block and refining his signature garbled lyrical genius, but he also enabled an atmosphere that thrived on fearlessness. “The only way anything interesting gets done for me in the studio is by somebody saying, ‘I’m going to do this,'” he explained at Exploratorium in 1988. “If you’re going to make an experiment, you have to make it,” he continued, adding, “You don’t defend it. You make it, and it either fails or it doesn’t. Usually, it fails. But you don’t realise those ones.”
Later, he also argued that the main purpose of the music was to “locate” it in “a frame of mind”, without delivering a certain message, but to focus on an “impression” of someone at the crux of different situations, where their realities were compromised and so were their minds. In many ways, Byrne was the ideal face of this vision, as he delivered the kind of rigid paranoia that reflected all of society’s deep-seated issues without feeling directly rooted in anything overly specific.
As a result, Talking Heads’ experimentalism worked because it felt like a mixture of everything and nothing; grounded in things we know and understand, while afloat with the anxieties of never knowing everything with any level of definitive certainty. With Eno, Talking Heads became a conduit for any interpretation, capturing the timeless rapture that lies beneath the culture with equal parts fear and confidence.
