Ranking the songs on Talking Heads’ album ‘Speaking in Tongues’
The biggest challenge in attempting to rank, grade, or assess any and all tracks on Talking Heads’ massive 1983 studio album Speaking in Tongues is that you would need to start, in theory, by somehow extricating from your brain all the associated connections between the songs on this record and the versions that followed a year later on arguably the greatest concert film and live album of all time, Stop Making Sense. Or do we need to do that?
There’s no rule book on these kind of trivial exercises, so I suppose rather than pretending to listen to Speaking In Tongues in the vacuum of a 1983 world, we can at least let a little bit of 1984 dribble into the stew, appreciating that the performances of songs like ‘Slippery People’ and ‘Swamp’ in Jonathan Demme’s glorious film absolutely raised their standing on later returns to the source material.
And if we’re going to do that, we might as well allow a little 2024 perspective, as well, considering all the renewed attention paid to this era of the Talking Heads’ career during the recent re-release of Stop Making Sense and the unexpected public appearances of the original quartet that came with it (on talk shows, if not on stage).
Now that we’ve opened up the floodgates, I guess we can let Spotify streams factor into the mix, too. Will our own rankings of the nine tracks on Speaking in Tongues align with the listening preferences of the app-attached general public, or will we prove to be special and unique in our worldview, like the chief of weird geniuses David Byrne himself? Let’s find out and delve into the nine tracks below…
Ranking the songs on Speaking in Tongues:
9. ‘Pull Up the Roots’
Controversy right from the launch pad. ‘Pull Up the Roots’ has got a very enjoyable groove and is well suited as the penultimate track on the LP, bringing together a lot of what’s come before it. Maybe that’s why it’s doomed to rank lower, by no fault of its own. There are just groovier numbers earlier on the record, rendering this closer more of a warm farewell to a masterpiece than a bonafide classic in its own right.
This one does introduce some lyrical themes that Byrne would return to many times in the ‘80s, singing: “Towns that disappeared completely / Pull up the roots, pull up the roots / Miles and miles of endless highway / Pull up the roots, pull up the roots“. The same imagery would come up in ‘Road to Nowhere’, ‘Nothing But Flowers’, and much of the film True Stories. But then again, nobody seems to like those efforts quite as much as the earlier Heads canon.
8. ‘I Get Wild / Wild Gravity’
Here is our least-streamed track on Spotify, for whatever that’s worth. ‘I Get Wild’ probably is the biggest victim of “not getting played in Stop Making Sense,” but you can also understand why. It’s kind of a less memorable version of ‘Girlfriend is Better’. There is a catchiness and sense of abandon to the party pop track, but therein lies its problem.
When the rest of the record stretches indie in all directions, both thematically and musically, ‘I Get Wild’ is happy to rest on its funky laurels, failing to ever blow your mind in the manner that many numbers to come soon do.
7. ‘Moon Rocks’
This list already feels like it’s positioning itself against the funkier excursions of Speaking In Tongues in favour of the New Wave flavours, but this is really about grading on long-term memorability: hooks and words in equal measure.
Lyrically, we’re landing somewhere between George Clinton and Fred Schneider here with the fun cosmic nonsense (“Flying saucers, levitation / Yo! I could do that / Gettin’ ready for heavy duty / Go on, give it a chance“). Some really fun, spacy synth stuff starts to happen around the five-minute mark, too, which helps elevate this UFO from the bottom of the list.
6. ‘Swamp’
One of the highlights of Stop Making Sense but ever so slightly less gripping in its original version, not that we couldn’t listen to Byrne do his John Lee Hooker growl all day. ‘Swamp’ typifies the art fun of the band, but it doesn’t typify them at their best.
The swamp, of course, is metaphorical as Byrne parades around as a protagonist trapped in a funk. But its outlook isn’t all that revolutionary. It’s the musicality where it excels, throwing in a clever bridge in Am to break up the flow and keep the Kafkaesque vibe unfurling in a happily chaotic swell.
5. ‘Making Flippy Floppy’
This wouldn’t be a bad choice of a track to introduce a friend to Talking Heads at their most fun and boundary-pushing. It is at this stage that we can recognise the true majesty of this record with fifth feeling like a sham for such a stellar cut of fresh, inventive funk.
All the same, there are stronger efforts than this on Speaking in Tongues. It might offer brilliance from Chris Frantz’s drum kit, a superbly strong hook, and enough danceability to get a stern coterie of nuns discoing, but it also doesn’t have quite the same charm as some of the others. It’s the piece you admire but wouldn’t quite hang on your wall, it’s the song to cheer you up, but you wouldn’t quite have it as your wedding day dance.
4. ‘Slippery People’
Perhaps the best chorus on the record and the third-best synth line to boot. The call and response unsurprisingly works incredibly well when transported to the live show in Stop Making Sense, and it’s mainly because that’s the superior version that the original falls a hair short of the podium. ‘Slippery People’ is an almost perfect piece of adrenalise new wave.
Byrne takes on the role of a preacher and performs the track as such, demarcating the band’s ability to look at music holistically. Not only is the song an epic groove, it’s an epic groove with a point. Filled with spiritual fervour, Byrne takes what is best about music that emancipates and yet subverts that and asks pertinent questions in the process.
3. ‘Girlfriend is Better’
An ecstatic hit of pure pop-funk perfection. ‘Girlfriend is Better’ schmoozes around with cool swagger and instant catchiness. The zigzagging synth adds a distinct dynamic feel to the jam, drumming up its own frenzy in a self-contained, friendly riot of a song. Byrne brags and the beat blares as the track rattles off the record, begging to be played live.
Lyrically, beyond the near-perfect chorus, the song is scatty. This offers a brilliant showcase of Byrne’s unique ability to offer songs from the point of view of someone who hasn’t gotten it all ironed out. So often, we are fed clean-cut wisdom by our musical characters, but here, there is a schismatic untidiness to the excited stream of thought that feels much more sincere.
2. ‘Burning Down the House’
Crazily enough, the only Top 10 US single of Talking Heads’ career. It’s certainly worthy of that honour and serves as a killer opening track on an album that not only shifted the band into funkier, dancier territory, but also seemed to be the one studio album on which all members of the band – Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison – were clearly and freely contributing elements from their own adventurous side projects (Byrne and Eno’s My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, Frantz and Weymouth’s first Tom Tom Club album, and Harrison’s 1981 solo effort, The Red and the Black).
‘Burning Down the House’ is arguably the most straightforward track on the album, but it’s not out of place or “safe”. It comes across like a mission statement, with the chorus pulled straight from a chant often heard at P-Funk concerts. It’s a song that four-four-year-old nieces adore and retired neighbours first danced to. It’s a blast of joy.
1. ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’
There are plenty of ways this tune can now distract us with imagery that wouldn’t have been in our brains back in 1983: David Byrne’s Astaire-esque lamp dance from Stop Making Sense is certainly one. How about its cameo in random films like Wall Street or Lars and the Real Girl? For me, it’s watching various YouTube clips of keyboard players trying to explain and/or recreate the absolutely singular sound of the main synth line, a genuinely “naive melody” that the band supposedly stumbled upon while experimenting with rhythmically partially hamstringing themselves; the guitar and bass both repeat an unchanging ostinato for the whole song.
‘This Must Be the Place’ is simultaneously the most out of step with the band’s new direction and the best example of their brilliance at a creative peak. It exemplifies why we love Talking Heads, they can break your heart while casually reinventing the wheel of music—that is a rare kind of magic, indeed.
