Speaking in Tongues Archives

Album: Speaking in Tongues
Year: 1983

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One of the rare artifacts that has survived the past 40 years of my life is a set of buttons that showed up at KFSR alongside Talking Heads 1983 album Speaking in Tongues. While I was known to wear buttons that that time in my life — I still remember how my The Clash on a mirror button got accidentally melted by an overly hot dryer — I never took those Talking Heads buttons out of their original packaging, figuring that they would “be worth something” in the future. This was the same impulse that that Tim & Kirk both had when they bought the limited edition — only 50,000 for the world — Robert Rauschenberg clear vinyl versions. Those went for $12.98, which was wayyy above my budget for an album that by definition I wasn’t going to play.

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Album: Speaking in Tongues
Year: 1983

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After putting out four albums between 1977-1980, it wasn’t until June of 1983 before Talking Heads put out another record, which might have been a recipe for disaster: even with The Name of This Band is Talking Heads to keep them in the public eye, three years was a long long time to be gone in the early 1980s, and whole movements had come around, gone away and been revived in that time. Instead, people had been catching up with them kinda like how Breaking Bad got so popular because it was on Netflix, and when Speaking in Tongues came out, the art/dance/pop/punk fusion that Talking Heads had helped pioneer was way more mainstream.

With Brian Eno gone, Speaking in Tongues was more straightforward funk than even Remain in Light, and you could definitely hear that in the opening song, the ebullient “Burning Down The House,” which actually opened with a bit of a feint: a swirling acoustic guitar, which soon meshed with synths — provided by Jerry Harrison, session guy Wally Badarou and Tina Waymouth on bass synth — and drums to provide the twitchy funk background over which Byrne sang.

Speaking in Tongues

Certain Songs #2627: Talking Heads – “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)”

Certain Songs #2626: Talking Heads – “Burning Down The House”