The Talking Heads song David Byrne described as a cross between Alice Cooper and Randy Newman
Like many bands in their infancy, new wave pioneers Talking Heads started out playing songs by other artists. Future frontman David Byrne first met Chris Frantz at the Rhode Island School of Design, and the pair began playing covers to entertain their friends. Eventually, though, the novelty of playing songs written by others got old, so Byrne set out to write his first original number.
That first track was ‘Psycho Killer’. Talking Heads’ first hit and still one of their biggest, the song featured an iconic bassline, Byrne’s unique vocals, and the inner monologue of its namesake – a so-called psycho killer. Between French declarations and urges to “run run run away”, Byrne’s esoteric lyrical style already shines through.
According to the songwriter himself, in a conversation with NPR, the future hit was “an experiment, to see if I could write a song. Chris [Frantz] and I, we had a band, and we played other people’s songs at school dances and things like that”.
Byrne had two influences in mind when he wrote the track – the ‘Godfather of Shock Rock’ Alice Cooper and Americana singer and film composer Randy Newman. Attempting to write a song that was “a cross between” the pair, he looked to marry drama with introspection.
“I thought I’d have the kind of dramatic subject that Alice Cooper might use,” he began, “but then look at kind of an interior monologue, the way Randy Newman might do it. And so I thought, let’s see if we can get inside this guy’s head. So we’re not going to talk about the violence or anything like that, but we’ll just get inside this guy’s kind of muddled up, slightly twisted thoughts.”
With ‘Psycho Killer’, he certainly succeeded. There’s an eerie quality to the song that has earned it a permanent place on Halloween playlists, yet there is a distinct lack of real violence in the track. The lyrics invoke a sense of anxiety without any explicit details with words like “tense”, “nervous” and “live wire”. Though we can’t exactly pinpoint why, there is a sense of unease in the inner monologue of Byrne’s persona, an understated, internal drama.
All that was left was for Byrne to add in some French, as he explained: “I imagined that he would imagine himself as very erudite and sophisticated, and so he would speak sometimes in French.” The frontman borrowed bassist Tina Weymouth, whose mother was from Brittany, and asked her to contribute some “pretty grand” words in French, “as if he’s going to tell us what kind of ambitions and how he sees himself”.
Between a songwriting experiment, Cooper and Newman’s influence and Weymouth’s French-speaking upbringing, a seminal new wave hit was born. Revisit ‘Psycho Killer’ below.
