The song Talking Heads regret: “Whiny and sad”
The hardest part of being in a band is staying on the same page. Creativity and inspiration are tough enough to manage solo, but when multiple minds are at play—each with their own ideas and vision—what feels like greatness to one member might be trash to another. Talking Heads is a prime example of this. What was golden to David Byrne was, at times, a major regret for the rest of the band, leaving them wishing they had never touched certain tracks.
This is a tale as old as time. Music that one band member loves ends up being another’s least favourite of their back catalogue. It was seen in John Lennon calling some of Paul McCartney’s Beatles songs “granny shit” or Mick Jagger hating the Stones album that Keith Richards likes best. It is always bound to happen, as you can’t expect different folks to like different strokes, and you especially can’t expect different artists and creatives to move exactly down the same path of inspiration.
But with Talking Heads, things were always a little different. While all the members are incredibly talented, it was always clear that David Byrne helmed that ship. These songs were the product of his mind, his ideas, his fancies and inspirations. The band, for better or for worse, was powered by his artistic vision as it was his voice, his lyrics and even his stage presence that made them, well, Talking Heads.
His fellow bandmates understood that. Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth even followed David Byrne to New York just to keep the band going, well aware that they’d found something special in Byrne. But they also have never been shy about the fact that he is a difficult character to work with.
“It’s like he can’t help himself,” Frantz told The Guardian, “His brain is wired in such a way that he doesn’t know where he ends and other people begin. He can’t imagine that anyone else would be important.” But with that tunnel vision on his own genius, it meant that the band were sometimes playing on songs they’d rather never have recorded.
“There’s a song called ‘Give Me Back My Name’ from Little Creatures. It never resonated with me,” Frantz told Vulture when asked if there was a Talking Heads song he wished had never come to be. It wasn’t that he hated it necessary; it just did absolutely nothing for him. “It’s a dispiriting song,” he said, “The music is good, but the lyrics and vocal melodies are whiny and sad. I wasn’t into it at that particular point in time. I’m not today either.”
A pattern emerges with all the songs that the rest of the band aren’t fans of. Tina Weymouth’s own least favourite is ‘The Big Country’, as she told Far Out, “I deliberately wanted to create something really dumb [laughs]. Because I think, oftentimes, confronted with David’s [Byrne] lyrics, we would interject into the song through the arrangement of the instruments. And so sometimes we would just do something that was completely contrary to whatever he was singing about.” In short, when the band didn’t get or like Byrne’s vision or lyrics, they’d stage a kind of musical coup in the instrumentation.
‘Give Me Back My Name’ was the same as Frantz admitted, “It was one of David’s “inner thoughts” songs. I’m not sure anybody really related to the song very much, but somehow it got to be on the album.” Byrne’s vision through and through, it was one of those moments where Talking Heads didn’t feel like a band, they felt like backing players to their singer.
