![]() ![]() On the calm and clean “Creatures of Love,” Bryne does nothing but marvel at the mundane. “Grand events very rarely happen.” By the time Talking Heads wrote Little Creatures, grand events were happening every day-every second, even. In a brief documentary from 1979, Byrne sits, half in shadow, criticizing other rock’n’rollers for singing about everyday life in “rather mythic terms.” “People get very emotional about these, sort of, very mundane things,” Byrne says. Little Creatures is a celebration of love, procreation, and all the normal things Byrne used to treat with a sense of fear and alienation (this is a man who once sang: “They say compassion is a virtue, but I don’t have the time”). “He sort of wants to hold the baby, but he’ll never say, ‘Can I hold the baby?’ We just say, ‘David, would you like to hold the baby?’ And David gets all stiff, like, ‘Am I doing it right?’”īy 1985, Byrne had caught the baby bug. “David’s so funny,” Frantz told Rolling Stone’s Christopher Connelly in 1983. Byrne didn’t immediately rush to write a song about him. Meanwhile, Talking Heads’ wedded rhythm section, Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz, had a little creature of their own: Their son Robin arrived in 1982. Such milestones in Byrne’s own life-marriage with his then-girlfriend, artist Adelle Lutz, and the birth of their daughter, Malu-were still a few years away. In a 1985 review, Rolling Stone insisted that Little Creatures was “the sound of David Byrne falling in love with normalcy.” Normalcy existed throughout Talking Heads’ catalog (what could be more normal than “buildings” and “food”?), but Little Creatures is their first album to examine one of normalcy’s most complicated and significant corners: Procreative sex and parental love. But Little Creatures was about a lot more than a new batch of instruments in the studio. Talking Heads’ love of funk and Afrobeat is alive and well on this album, evident in Weymouth’s walloping basslines and a smattering of hand drums they also experiment with country western pedal steel (on “Creatures of Love”), bubbling synths (“Walk It Down”), and drumline snare (“Road to Nowhere”). Critics keenly traced the arc of their success from RISD art obsessives to downtown punk affiliates to a 10-piece band of Afrobeat enthusiasts. In addition to their hugely influential discography, they’d worked extensively with Brian Eno, recorded an expansive live album (1982’s The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads), and collaborated with director Jonathan Demme on the groundbreaking and now-classic concert film Stop Making Sense. ![]() By this point, the band had already run the gamut of creative endeavors. Little Creatures is a triumphant pop document that celebrates life’s simple joys, the exact thing Talking Heads once weaponized. After a decade in which they’d produced five pivotal LPs, each more unexpected than the last, Talking Heads had laid down their most approachable album ever. “We spent so many years trying to be original that we don’t know what original is anymore.” Readers wouldn’t completely understand what she meant until July, when Little Creatures reached No. “It’s so much fun to be able to relax and just play without feeling you have to be avant-garde all the time,” bassist Tina Weymouth told The New York Times’ Ken Emerson in May 1985, one month before the album’s release. Byrne didn’t have the easy star appeal of Barry Gibb, but by 1985, when Talking Heads released their sixth studio album Little Creatures, they’d become more melodic, more relatable: They’d made a pop album. Listening to their early catalog now, it’s clear their sense of melody didn’t get enough credit. A few early singles like “Psycho Killer” and “Life During Wartime” snuck onto the charts by the end of the ’70s, buried under glossy hits by ABBA, Bee Gees, and Michael Jackson. Having sprouted at Rhode Island School of Design and relocated to New York in the mid-’70s, Talking Heads were wedged between two worlds: They were artsy outliers of the punk community too clean-cut and high-minded to really blend in at CBGB, yet too odd for listeners accustomed to a steady diet of Eagles and Fleetwood Mac.
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