Posts Tagged ‘Talking Heads’

Road to Nowhere: Attack of the Clones Division

Thursday, April 24th, 2014

Sometimes I’ll cruise iTunes looking for covers of songs I like. While doing so for Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere,” I discovered that one ensemble had released the same cover of “Road to Nowhere” under multiple band names.

Eleven times.

Indeed, the versions of “Road to Nowhere” on iTunes by the following bands (all of which clock in between 3:49 and 3:53) are all exactly the same:

  • Burning Down the House
  • The Insurgency
  • Klone Orchestra
  • The Minister of Soundalikes
  • Monsters of Rock
  • Psycho Killers
  • Secret Popstars
  • Studio Sunset
  • Studio Union
  • Tribute Stars
  • Wildlife

    • Moreover, several of those incarnations of the same band (Studio Sunset, Burning Down the House, Psycho Killers, Wildlife, Klone Orchestra) appear to have issued the same entire album of Talking Heads covers (with the same tracks) multiple times. Indeed, they appear to have done it three times under just their Studio Sunset name!

    (BTW, if you really want that album, the cheapest version is Burning Down the House’s A Salute to Talking Heads, which is a mere $5.99, compared to $7.99 or $9.99 for some of the others.)

    But wait! There’s a completely different group that did the exact same thing with the same song.

    Eleven times.

    All these covers of “Road to Nowhere” under these band names (all of which clock in around 4:01) are the same:

  • Ameritz
  • The Hit Co.
  • The Hit Group
  • The Hit Crew
  • OMP Allstars
  • Party City
  • Rock Fest
  • The Rock Masters
  • Singing Mouths
  • Studio Group

    • Finally, here eight cover versions that are not only exactly the same, but the underlying track is so close to the ones above they might be the exact same version with a different vocal mix:

  • The Comptones
  • Dynamite
  • Driving Masters
  • The Falling Downs
  • Graham Blvd.
  • Road Demonz
  • Rock Playlist Masters
  • TMZ TV Tunes

    • Tags:, ,
    Posted in Music, Uncategorized | No Comments »

    My Top 10 Favorite Talking Heads Songs

    Monday, June 3rd, 2013

    Apropos nothing but a stray comment, here’s my ten favorite Talking Heads songs:

    1. Road to Nowhere: Great road music, compulsively listenable, with dark, disturbing lyrical overtones. “There’s a city in my mind/Come along and take that ride/And it’s all right/Baby it’s all right”

    2. Dream Operator: Perhaps their most simple, beautiful, wistful song. “Let go of your life/Grab on to my hand/Here in the clouds/Where we’ll understand.” (The glass harmonica version off the Sounds From True Stories soundtrack is pretty wonderful as well.)

    3. Burning Down the House (live version): I prefer the hard-charging, straight ahead version off Stop Making Sense, but it’s very close, as the spooky, echoey album version has much to recommend it as well. “People on their way to work said, ‘Baby what did you expect?’/Gonna burst into flame, go ahead.”

    4. Heaven (live version): By contrast, the live version of this song is far better than the studio version. Their other wistful, beautiful song (though with far more ironic lyrics). “Heaven/Heaven is a place/A place where nothing/Nothing ever happens.”

    5. The Overload: Dark, heavy and foreboding, with a slow, inescapable baseline and lyrics that bring to mind W. B. Yates’ “The Second Coming.” A song (to my mind) about the end of all things. Compare and contrast with Laurie Anderson’s “Gravity’s Angel.” “A terrible signal…”

    6. Life During Wartime (live version): Another burner. I wonder if combatants in any of the various conflicts going on around the world play this between firefights. “This ain’t no party/This ain’t no disco/This ain’t no foolin around…”

    7. City of Dreams: Talking Heads at their most twangy. I wonder if disc jockeys at country stations ever slip this into the rotation. “We live in the city of dreams/We ride on this highway of fire/If we wake, and find it gone/Please remember this our favorite song.” (“City of Steel,” off the the Sounds From True Stories soundtrack, is even twangier.)

    8. Memories Can’t Wait: A long, deep drink of neurotic paranoia from inside a damaged mind unable to control its thoughts or direction. “Don’t look so disappointed/It isn’t what you hoped for, is it?”

    9. Hey Now: A pure dose of Zydeco-tinged, childlike goofiness. “Buy me a/rubber ball.”

    10. Nothing But Flowers: Byrne’s paean to modern American society, while tweaking radical environmentalists. “I dream of cherry pies, candy bars and chocolate chip cookies!”

    Honorable mention: Once in a Lifetime, Nothing But Flowers, Electric Guitar, Psycho Killer (live version), Walk It Down

    And this is just the Talking Heads; favorite David Byrne songs would be a separate list.

    Tags:, , ,
    Posted in Music, video | 3 Comments »

    Sounds From True Stories: The Great Lost David Byrne Album

    Saturday, June 18th, 2011

    In the 1980s, two of my favorite albums were soundtracks David Byrne did as odd side projects: Music from The Knee Plays, Byrne’s linking music for the never-staged 9 1/2 hour Robert Wilson avant-garde musical spectacle the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, which was also supposed to have music by Philip Glass and Gavin Bryers. (The Glass music was eventually released, and which I also recommend; as far as I know the Bryers pieces haven’t been), and Sounds From True Stories, the soundtrack of incidental music from his quirky film True Stories, which shares some themes with the Talking Heads album of the same name.

    And then both of them went out of print and, for the longest time, never came out on CD. This was deeply frustrating, because my old record player finally gave up the ghost, and besides The Forest and “Hanging Upside Down,” those two albums contain Byrne’s best solo work.

    Finally, a few years ago, Knee Plays came out, and is well worth picking up for tracks like “Winter” and “In the Future.” (I saw The Dirty Dozen Brass Band perform live accompaniment to a sort of mime show at the Bass Concert Hall way back in the dim mists of time.)

    But I still wait in vain for Sounds From True Stories to be released on CD or MP3.

    Fortunately, someone has put up all the tracks on YouTube (complete with LP pops and hisses). So here are all the tracks in order. Consider this a chance to enjoy a great, lost David Byrne album (and provide a kick in the butt for Byrne and whoever owns the Sire back catalog to stop dicking around and release it to CD or iTunes).

    The album contains a wild variety of styles, with Country and Western, Lounge Jazz and Tejano among them. if you don’t want to listen to all of them, try “Dinner Music,” “Mall Muzak,” and “Glass Operator.”

    January 2017 Update: The previous source of these has been kicked off YouTube, so I went out and found what replacements I could:

    Road Song:

    Glass Operator:

    Update 2020: All of those songs (and more!) have now been released as an extra disc on the Criterion edition of the film True Stories.

    Tags:, , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Music | 11 Comments »