The biggest regret David Byrne had in Talking Heads
If there’s one thing that can never be questioned, it’s David Byrne’s commitment to the bit that has seen him at every turn of his career going all in, dreaming up some boundary-pushing, rule-breaking vision and then seeing it through to completion, except at one.
Let’s take Stop Making Sense as a perfect example. At the height of the band’s success, they could have easily just done a good tour, done a standard show, and still, everyone would have celebrated it and lauded it as amazing; the band were already so musically tight and so groovy that they didn’t need to try really.
Thus, they didn’t need to try as hard as taking the entire concert set-up and playing around with it, starting first with Byrne solo and building slowly into something massive through different acts, and a mid-way interval. Moreover, the frontman himself definitely didn’t need to intellectualise the whole thing, building himself a character and rehearsing it for ages in advance.
“It’s me as a character, or me as myself, being anxious and isolated in the beginning, and then gradually finding himself with this little supportive community,” Byrne told The Ringer as he saw the show, and his part in it, as more than just a good gig. That’s the type of guy he is: once he has an idea, he takes it to the furthest point, and that can sometimes lead to his biggest career regret, haunted by that one time he didn’t do that.
In 1986, one of Byrne’s visions took him into the world of film as he made True Stories, an anthology movie that drops in on residents of a small fictional town, which saw him play an unnamed, cowboy-hat-wearing stranger in town and act as the narrator, but then there’s an entire cast of characters played by names like John Goodman, Spalding Gray, Swoosie Kurtz and more.
The rest of Talking Heads feature as Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison, appearing as the ‘Lip-Synchers’, but largely, the film feels like an entity outside of the band. However, as opposed to the planned cast recording getting its due spotlight, when the soundtrack and the songs from the movie were released, it was all by the band and came in the form of True Stories, their own 1986 album. Instead, that recognition only came later in the form of Sounds from True Stories, which was a messy release of Talking Heads’ versions, cast recordings and other music from the film.
Byrne has always regretted it, telling Rolling Stone, “I regret that with True Stories we didn’t put out a record with the cast singing the songs instead of me”.
Given that the project had always existed outside of himself and outside of the band, it felt wrong to him that the actual characters’ voices weren’t heard instead as he explained, “They were written with other voices in mind, and to me the other people, like Pop Staples, did it much better than I did,” adding remorsefully, “I regret it never worked out to happen that way.”
