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By working with a band, they already have their own audience. Adrian and I kicked around a few different ideas, and one of them was to use various studio musicians and other people who love Talking Heads. RIFF: The fact that Jerry flew in just for that 2019 Turkuaz show tells me that you already knew exactly what you wanted to do at that point. The group will perform at BottleRock, playing songs not only from the classic album but also other Talking Heads hits, songs from each of the participant’s catalogs and one or two newer collaborative tracks. The pandemic changed that, but didn’t diminish the enthusiasm of Harrison, Belew or Turkuaz. The “Remain In Light” shows were supposed to happen in 2020, the 40th anniversary of the album. “After Turkuaz had played three songs, I turned to him and said, ‘That’s it they’re perfect. The Exit/In just happened to be the club where Belew first saw the Talking Heads perform, in 1977. “I felt like the world needed this joyful, danceable kind of upbeat thing that’s still real cool it’s not just dumb-danceable,” Belew said. The two would talk about it on numerous occasions when Harrison and he would get together in Nashville. “I knew that they were pretty familiar with the material, and they had, you might say, all the pieces in place so… it wouldn’t be putting together a band one person at a time.”īelew said his fans would always comment on social media about the Talking Heads’ 1980 Rome concert, so he was game for a reunion. “I played a number of times with, often doing ‘Take Me to the River’ or another Talking Heads song,” Harrison said in a video call from his home, alongside Belew in Tennessee and Turkuaz’s Dave Brandwein in Playa del Rey, near Los Angeles. Specifically, Harrison and Belew had a plan to create a tribute to the Talking Heads’ acclaimed fourth album, 1980’s Remain In Light. Belew lives just north of Nashville, but Harrison felt so strong about this idea that he flew to the show from San Francisco. He had an idea to re-create the music of the Talking Heads using the band, whom he’d produced a few years earlier, whose members had come together with a shared love of the Talking Heads in the first place. Singer/songwriter David Byrne and keyboard/guitarist Jerry Harrison join me In the Studio for Talking Heads’ terrific cover of Al Green/ Teenie Hodges’ “Take Me to the River” from More Songs About Buildings and Food the pulsing pre-9/11 domestic terrorism in “ Life During Wartime” the MTV video classic “Once in a Life Time” ”Burning Down the House” and “Girlfriend is Better” from the brilliant 1983 breakthrough Speaking in Tongues the essential multi-media film by Jonathan Demme and soundtrack album Stop Making Sense in September 1984 “And She Was” from June 1985’s two million seller Little Creatures and “Wild Wild Life” from True Stories.Harrison invited Belew to come out to a show at Nashville’s famed Exit/In in 2019 to catch Brooklyn funk nonet Turkuaz. Jeff Gold ‘s sumptuous coffee table tome 101 Essential Rock Records devotes two whole pages to their debut Talking Heads :77 which contained the riveting tension of “ Psycho Killer “. A casual perusal of the band’s discography on reveals more stars than a Texas sky on a clear night. No wonder: the following year many of the same music industry people would place no less than four Talking Heads albums onto Rolling Stone magazine’s Top 500 Albums of All Time list, including Stop Making Sense at #345. In 2002, their first year of eligibility, the Talking Heads were elected into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s a facade, & now you want to vicariously live that fantasy for yourself.” “The audience goes to a show, and maybe your girlfriend seems like she’s more attracted to the lead singer than to you anymore because he seems sexier. “And I think it’s quite demeaning for the audience,” continues Harrison. I think it’s a reason why some get involved in drug excess, & get involved in trying to live this fantasy that a lot of people have about rock and roll.” And one of the problems with this is a lot of the musicians believe their own press, and believe this about themselves. All of these images where they try and look like ‘I’m the sexiest person alive’. They try to look like pirates they try to look like juvenile delinquents. There’s often been a fantasy aspect to rock and roll where the artists try to be bigger than life. And I think that was inspiring to people. “One of the things that I think Talking Heads stood for,” muses keyboard player/ guitarist Jerry Harrison, “ was sticking to your guns, doing what you did best, and where it took you and whatever success it brought you, then that’s what happened.