The good thing

This blog post was originally published on my WordPress site, https://willatk.wordpress.com, on September 21, 2019.

For the last month or so I’ve been spending a lot of time with Talking Heads’ second album, 1978’s More Songs About Buildings and Food. I’d always internalized the general consensus of critics — summed up in various retrospective reviews and best-of lists — that Remain in Light was the band’s ultimate artistic peak, the previous three albums being but a steady culmination toward this point. But with all respect to Remain in Light, it’s More Songs About Buildings and Food, that, to me, most neatly distills the idea of “Talking Heads” over the course of its 42 minutes.

Following their debut Talking Heads: 77, released a year earlier, More Songs isn’t a radical departure but rather a steady maturation of the band’s personality. Like its predecessor, More Songs most immediately registers as a satire of the consumerism and mass media that permeated midcentury America, the harbingers of all the things we now call “neoliberal”: David Byrne’s lyrics read like a collection of slogans and overhead mantras, veering between meaningless corporate-speak (“As we economize / efficiency is multiplied”), parodies of creative-industry-types (on “Found a Job,” a couple rekindles their relationship by co-creating a TV show), and romantic anxiety (“the girls” and “the boys” appear more as abstract categories than as actual humans on songs like “I’m Not in Love” and “The Girl Wants to Be with the Girls”; on “Stay Hungry,” Byrne opens with the declaration, “I think we can signify our love now.”). As on 77, Byrne is fixated on the character of the happy-to-please office drone, always concerned with getting to “work,” while his vocals suggest a kind of schizophrenic urgency that bubbles underneath. Even the cover art of More Songs, which reconstructs the four members of Talking Heads out of a photomosaic of close-up polaroids, suggests a sort of fracturing of the self into discrete, efficient bits.

I have adopted this and made it my own
Cut back the weakness, reinforce what is strong
I have adopted this and made it my own
Cut back the weakness, reinforce what is strong
Watch me work!
Watch me work!
Watch me work, Ha! Ha! Ha!
Watch me work!

But it wasn’t until More Songs that Byrne’s lyrics really met their musical match. With Brian Eno serving as producer for the first time, the album boasts a density and tightness not yet perfected by 77; each element of the four-piece moves in tandem. Every arrangement on the album moves as a mass of potential energy, churning underneath Byrne like an intelligent machine. With their octave-jumping bass line and four-on-the-floor kick drum, the first few seconds of opener “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel” are representative of the record that follows. It sounds liable to burst at any second, but the release instead comes in small, efficient bursts, and in the form of Byrne’s vocals, which in their volatility serve as the ideal foil to the music’s rigid economy.

To me, More Songs About Buildings and Food is a case study in the album-as-song-cycle, where every track seems to come from the same color palette, taking the same basic constituent parts and reassembling them ten or eleven different ways. To mix this metaphor even further, I like to think of albums like this as containing a single world, with each track simply a distinct entrance into it. (Heaven or Las Vegas, and maybe Pet Sounds, also come to mind as noteworthy examples.) It demands to be listened to in full, yet its lack of a grand structural arc or conceptual conceit — like that of Remain in Light, for example, or, for that matter, every Radiohead album post-The Bends — makes it surprisingly easy to jump in at any point. Even the title of More Songs About Buildings and Food suggests we’re dealing with something like a collection, rather than a big statement. Perhaps that’s why More Songs, unlike Remain in Light, isn’t as often granted “masterpiece” status in the Talking Heads canon (though it may be a close second).

Talking Heads spend the first nine tracks of More Songs About Buildings and Food building up this world, which makes the delayed gratification of the last two tracks — “Take Me to the River” and “The Big Country” — that much more satisfying. These final two songs are among the strongest on the album, yet ironically, they’re the least representative of its overall sound. They dial back the urgency of the half-hour that precedes them, stretching out where the others contract and concluding the record on a surprisingly tender note. “Take Me to the River,” now one of the band’s most popular songs, is the rare cover that exceeds its source material in every way, slowing down Al Green’s original and showcasing one of Byrne’s most powerful vocal performances.

“The Big Country,” meanwhile, is nothing short of gorgeous, managing to subtly fold in country influences without sounding remotely out of place in the context of the album. (You can almost imagine John Goodman singing this in True Stories.) Like “Found a Job,” too, it’s a reminder that Byrne is quite an underrated storyteller, something that often gets overlooked amid his tendency for abstractions and mantras. The narrator of “The Big Country” looks out of the window of an airplane at the heartland of America, finally seeing the farmlands and factories and buildings — all those signifiers of modern life that dot Byrne’s lyrics — from a bird’s-eye view. He speculates on the overwhelming sameness of the lives unfolding underneath; he has a clear view of “how these things work together,” he says, and from his height he assumes a position of superiority over the suburban sprawl: “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me,” he sings, “I wouldn’t live like that, no siree.”

Then we come to the farmlands and the undeveloped areas
And I have learned how these things work together
I see the parkway that passes through them all
And I have learned how to look at these things

By the end of the song, though, this posturing is turned on its head, as Byrne finally admits, “I’m tired of traveling / I want to be somewhere.” Behind the disdain for suburban life, there’s an envy of and even a sympathy for those people on the ground “having fun with their neighbors and kids,” if only to have a place to call home. More than a takedown of rural America, as it might seem at face-value, “The Big Country” suggests a longing for the stability of place, any place, amid the rootlessness and exhaustion inflicted by the modern world from which Byrne was writing. If More Songs About Buildings and Food spends most of its runtime filtering, reflecting, and artfully skewering that world, “The Big Country” is a direct response to it. The track is a moment of pathos and melancholy from a band not always known for it, years before “This Must Be the Place” took the mantle of “Talking Heads love song.”

With those final two tracks, the band caps off an album that showcases everything Talking Heads do best, and one that has spawned dozens of imitators in the decades since. (Every time some new post-punk band gets described as “nervy” or “taut,” it’s probably thanks to More Songs About Buildings and Food.) Forty-one years later, it’s both a near-perfect musical statement and a prescient critique of a modernizing world.