Next time I teach songwriting, maybe I’ll assign the class to write a Talking Heads song, not so that the students imitate the style, but so they experience the pleasure of the method.Īs much as it was inspired by funk, the song does not groove like a funk song. Meanwhile, it’s possible to have an excellent song with goofy or meaningless lyrics, and it’s also possible to love a song in a foreign language without having any idea what it’s about.

Song lyrics can be exquisitely crafted literature on the page and still not work if they don’t sound good when you sing them. She also says that lyrics are “a melodic poem, not prose”, and that is a crucial insight that not many people appreciate.

Tina Weymouth says that David Byrne’s lyrics favor “rhythm over rhyme”, which is literally true, they often don’t rhyme at all. There was no logical or linear connection between them. Seeing all of them at a single glance let me identify the ones that worked together. Later, I wrote down in my tiny handwriting as many phrases from the tape that fit on one sheet. They helped me come up with aphorisms like, “Time for jumpin’ overboard” and “Watch out, you might get what you’re after.” These lines were like little verbal Zen poems. I had seen them in concert at a club and had their albums. Many of the phrases may have been inspired by lines in P-Funk songs. As I drove, I scatted the melody and recorded every random phrase I could think of that fit the song’s groove. Driving occupies one part of your brain, freeing up the other. You can see Paul McCartney using the same method to write lyrics in the Get Back documentary.Ī car is a good place to write lyrics. As he sang, I took notes and played back the bits that I thought had the most potential for a melody. I used a four-track recorder to capture takes of David singing what initially were experimental, nonsensical vocals. (One of the Brides, Lynn Mabry, is singing backup in Stop Making Sense.)īefore Parliament came on that night, the audience chanted things like, “Goddamn, get off your ass and jam” and “Burn down the house! Burn down the house!” That last one stuck with me. The music’s inspiration began when Tina and I went to Madison Square Garden in February 1979 to see Parliament, Funkadelic, Bootsy Collins and the Brides of Funkenstein. I simply combined aphorisms and nonsequiturs that had an emotional connection. They aren’t telling a story or signifying anything. I envisioned the song as an expression of liberation, to break free from whatever was holding you back.Īs for the rest of the lyrics, there are no hidden meanings. When I wrote the lyrics in 1982, the title phrase was a metaphor for destroying something safe that entrapped you. “Burning Down the House” wasn’t a song about arson. It’s especially interesting to hear the demos at different stages of development artists hardly ever share those.įor more detail, there’s a great oral history in the Wall Street Journal of all publications. David Byrne:

It only uses sounds found in the original multitracks, and it’s a banger.ĭavid Byrne explains the writing process in some depth in this 1984 NPR interview. If you take away the specifics of the groove, the production, and David Byrne’s unhinged vocal style, you take away the core of the song. I have heard plenty that were okay, but none of them were anything you would need to hear twice. And yet, I have never heard a really good cover. No Talking Heads song has been covered by more people.

You can demonstrate the intense Talking-Heads-ness of “Burning Down The House” by listening to covers of it. In another P-Funk touch, notice that Tina Weymouth is playing synth bass, which she did for its more crisp sound. The ambient synths in this version are played by Bernie Worrell from P-Funk, which is appropriate, because the band was drawing on P-Funk when they wrote the song in the first place – more on that below. (This is one of several Talking Heads tracks graced by Badarou’s synths see also his exquisite playing on “ This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)“.) Steve Scales plays concert toms, and you can also see him playing them in the sweat-drenched version from Stop Making Sense. In addition to the four band members, the track also features Wally Badarou‘s mysterious Prophet-5 leads. It isn’t as conceptually or musically groundbreaking as “ Once In A Lifetime“, but it contains depths of its own. Here is the closest Talking Heads ever came to a legitimate pop hit, their only song to crack the Billboard Top Ten.

Lyrics burnin it down