Remain In Light by Talking Heads
When Talking Heads finished touring for their equally masterful 1979 album, Fear Of Music, the band decided to take a small break to explore other creative ideas. In this creative intermission, 2 of the band’s members, married couple Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, were having doubts about staying in Talking Heads, especially as frontman David Byrne had assumed near complete control of the band. Deciding to leave for the Caribbean, they both experimented in Haitian Voodoo rituals, where they learned multitudinous native rhythm instruments. They also met Sly And Robbie, a brilliant reggae group famous for their percussive elements in their music. This vacation ended with them buying an apartment in Nassau, where the band would eventually reconvene, and where Frantz, Weymouth, and other bandmate Jerry Harrison eventually realized that the reason Byrne had such control over the band was because of the fact that he was their main source of creative output. As such, they made an agreement to ditch the outdated notion of a frontman and their bandmates, opting for a creative process where they, as Byrne put it, “[Sacrificed their] egos for mutual cooperation.”
Birthed from this turbulent gestation period may be the greatest alternative album to ever reach the ears of the world. Remain In Light still stands as an innovative, smart, snappy, and endlessly creative classic more than 30 years after it was first released.
The primary strength in Remain In Light is in it’s impeccable production, courtesy of music’s resident wizard, Brian Eno. Eno’s incorporations of samples and loops in the production of it were, for music in 1980, crazy. The live settings of some jam sessions from the Nassau apartment were used to create a sense of improvisation, songs seeming to move at a whim. Eno, working with Chris Frantz, the percussionist, also optimized dense polyrhythms using the instruments Frantz and Weymouth had become familiar with in Haiti, building off of the sounds that previously inspired Fear Of Music opener “I Zimbra”. These overtly African and Caribbean influences made Remain In Light all the more funky, danceable, and, not to sound like Shaggy Rogers, but groovy. For example, “The Great Curve” packs 3 measures worth of jittery, complex polyrhythms into an addictively feverish adventure into madness, combining with not one, not two, but three different layers of vocal loops from Byrne and Eno together to create a quick tempoed, lyrically abstract, stone cold rush of energy, making it my personal favorite Talking Heads song. It then crams in a guitar solo from longtime King Crimson instrumentalist Adrian Belew and a brazen brass ensemble into the fracas, somehow avoiding the seemingly inevitable feeling of excess in music of such sheer magnitude, and creating a masterwork of musical structure. “Born Under Punches(The Heat Goes On)” takes two of Tina Weymouth’s intertwining basslines, an undeniably hip shaking, polyrhythm dripping beat, and an addictive riff from keyboardist Jerry Harrison to end every 4th measure, looping these elements for 5 addictive head bopping minutes, topped off with David Byrne at his paranoid best, dropping tense, uneasy lines about Watergate like “Take a look at these hands; The hand speaks; the hand of a government man.”
These existential, abstract lyrics, now a David Byrne trademark, heap upon a sense of paranoia, dread, and urgency upon the grooves of Brian Eno and the Heads. His double tracked, call and response vocals work in an absolutely addictive fashion. Songs like “Seen And Not Seen” and my go-to karaoke song, “Once In A Lifetime”, are some of the best examples of Byrne’s paranoia filled diatribes. “Seen And Not Seen” takes faces and uses them as a metaphor for personas of people, turning the entire thing into an insane take on insecurity and the concept of personas as a whole, all over an oddball backing track filled with the sort of left-field blips and chirps that would have felt at home on Eno’s classic 1980 solo effort, Another Green World. Elsewhere, Byrne’s forever iconic vocal delivery on “Once In A Lifetime” creates an undeniably magnificent piece on the fears of passing time. Apparently, in order to write lyrics, Byrne was heavily inspired by the posturings of radio evangelists, and their metaphor usages. The vocals seem to be preached, not sung, by a man wise beyond his years, a man above the existential dread shown in songs like “Crosseyed and Painless”. Paired with Eno’s oddball, genius production techniques from Oblique Strategies, which involved using a Fela Kuti technique of starting different elements at different parts in the measures and messing up rhythm counts, and allowing the band to overdub things into the song without being able to hear any other members additions, “Once In A Lifetime” shines as a soaring high point in an album filled to the brim with high points.
Remain In Light’s genius lies in what an effort it took to create it. The promises of a completely creatively collaborative work, though surely impossible, was pulled off by Talking Heads with unbelievable success. The dependency of each member on each other is visibly evident, as no clear component of any of these songs shines singularly. The songs were made so that they would either flop entirely or shine in complete synchronicity. Thankfully, the entire album is consistently the latter, with the abstract percussion of Frantz, the bass grooves of Weymouth, the sharp guitars and smooth keys of Harrison, and the vocals of Byrne all colliding in marvelous harmony to create some of the most enjoyable experimental music ever made. It’s the reason that Remain In Light is considered a landmark, an unforgettable album unbridled in creativity, and unrelenting in the ability to act on impulse to create something otherworldly.