The first song Talking Heads singer David Byrne wrote
Songwriting is often a skill that develops over time, requiring dedication and numerous failed attempts before striking gold. However, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne has always defied norms and conventions, including his approach to crafting songs.
Although Byrne began playing music at a young age, songwriting didn’t come into the equation until significantly later. Before reaching his teenage years, Byrne was already an accomplished multi-instrumentalist with a knack for learning at an incredibly impressive rate. However, songwriting continued to evade him, preferring to play other people’s creations than work on his own.
His first band, Revelation, was a musical education for Byrne and was a period that allowed him to improve his craft, but it wasn’t until Talking Heads formed that he finally became prolific with the pen. He’d accumulated years of experience by this stage, evident in the first song he wrote for the band, which presented him as a fully formed songwriter.
The track in question is ‘Psycho Killer’, which was released as the band’s third single in 1977. It had been lying around since 1974, a time when talking heads were known as the Artistics. It was their first song to gain widespread attention, and half a century after Byrne wrote the composition, ‘Psycho Killer’ remains his trademark effort.
Speaking with David Sheff from Playboy, Byrne explained the origin of ‘Psycho Killer’. He said: “It was the first song I ever wrote. I had been listening to some Alice Cooper songs at the time, years ago, and I liked some of them. I wondered if you took those overly dramatic subjects and, in a sensitive way, wrote from inside the person’s mind, would it work?”
He continued: “It became a rock song, though it was intended as a ballad. It’s fascinating to explore society’s aberrations. Those things are in everybody; they just have gotten out of proportion for some people. I read a series of interviews with hijackers. That helped a lot, because some of them seemed to be doing it on a whim, and others seemed to have a mission.”
In the three years of the song’s evolution, before it morphed into the version of ‘Psycho Killer’ that would become an emblem of Byrne’s career, the track changed dramatically, which is down to his Talking Heads bandmates.
Bassist Tina Weymouth later told Este Haim for Interview Magazine how the creation of ‘Psycho Killer’ was typical of how the band would operate, noting: “When it was with Talking Heads, like with ‘Psycho Killer’, David [Byrne] had an idea with his guitar. He had a chorus and the first verse. But drums are pretty key, especially in all of our songs. With Talking Heads, improvising would start with the rhythm beds.”
With ‘Psycho Killer’, Talking Heads established a dynamic that proved to be a winning formula, but it also showed they needed to work as a collective to fulfil their potential. While Byrne had already written the lyrics for ‘Psycho Killer’, it wasn’t until his bandmates had applied their touches that it became worthy of release.
