Among all of Talking Heads’ other talents – from fearless musical invention to killer fashion sense – the New York band had impeccable timing. A decade earlier, in the mid-Seventies, the lineup had formed in time to lead the New Wave scene from the sticky stage of CBGB to the global charts.
Now, in June 1985, David Byrne (vocals/guitar), Jerry Harrison (guitar/keys), Tina Weymouth (bass) and Chris Frantz (drums) would release the most commercial album of their career just as music became a visual commodity, vying for the eyeballs of America’s youth.
“I don’t think Little Creatures is the best Talking Heads record,” says Harrison, four decades later. “But I’ll tell ya, one of the reasons it’s our best-selling record is that it’s the beginning of MTV.”
Certainly, it was hard to escape the two heavy-rotation hits, in the form of Road to Nowhere’s gospel/accordion-bolstered hoedown and the twitchy alt-pop shimmer of And She Was. Yet neither song is representative of the Heads’ evolving playbook.
“Little Creatures was the beginning of Americana for us,” says Harrison of an album that finds his guitar lines jousting with Eric Weissberg’s pedal steel on cuts like Creatures of Love and Walk It Down. “That record was basically short, melodic, succinct, straightforward songs once again. It wasn’t ‘African’-sounding at all. And it wasn’t the big band we’d been exploring for about four years. In a way, it was fun to once again have the pressure back on the four of us.”
Across their first 10 years and five studio albums, Talking Heads had recorded all over the map (1978’s More Songs About Buildings and Food found the art-rockers in the incongruous setting of Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas). Now, with Little Creaturesthe band put down roots.
“We were very much of the opinion that each album should have its own identity and atmosphere,” Harrison says. “On Little CreaturesI introduced us to Sigma Sound because I’d worked there when I produced Nona Hendryx. That was our home after that.
“They did a lot of disco and R&B, and the New York branch was a little different from Philly, but nevertheless, these were the people that had done Teddy Pendergrass and the O’Jays and the whole Philly sound. And y’know, that was very compatible with us.”
That said, admits Harrison with a laugh, his favorite guitar part on Little Creatures was inspired by a rather more establishment figure. “I really like the end of And She Was with that distorted guitar. I thought it sounded like Neil Diamond’s Cherry, Cherry – that was my influence on that song.”
Little Creatures broke the Billboard Top 20, was crowned The Village Voice’s album of the year and went on to sell two million copies – not bad for a release that started life as the sweepings from another project. “Little Creatures was actually the outtakes from when David was writing songs for True Stories (1986),” Harrison says. “But I actually think it’s a better body of songs, personally…”
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