Great Songs from My Favorite Year in Music: 1985, Part 32

Talking Heads - "Road to Nowhere," "And She Was," & "Stay Up Late"







(Album Release: July 1985)
There is no doubt in my mind that, if you accept the premise that Morrissey and Ian McCulloch are modern poets, while Robert Smith and Martin Gore are of the Romantics, then Talking Heads are postmodern novelists. David Byrne and company always seemed a bit too smart to gain mass appeal, but they somehow did it anyway. I suppose, like Shakespeare, they presented several different layers of material to appeal to different sensibilities. Case in point, the above three songs from their 1985 album, Little Creatures. "Road to Nowhere," the second single from the record, is seemingly a photo negative of David Bowie's "Changes," with similar sentiments, yet either ironic in its nihilism or purposefully non-optimistic. This may be why several politicians and causes have tried to co-opt the song for their own purposes. It is a metaphor, symbolic, and I doubt meant to be taken at its literal word. "And She Was," the album's second single, is apparently written about a girl in Byrne's high school class who took acid in a field, but as all well written art does, it can be taken outside of that setting and adapted to mean different things, such as a love and appreciation for nature, a kind of existentialism, or perhaps pantheism. "Stay Up Late" was never a single, but it got major airplay, at least on the stations I used to listen to. Like the others, the song seems deceptively simple. I've seen many an internet interpretation of it that is way too literal. And, hey, I could be totally wrong, but I really don't think it's about the joy of having babies. Rather, it could either be a scathing remark upon people in America having kids just for the "fun" of it, without realizing the consequences, or could be one lover treating another like a child. Either way, the silliness of the lyrics and the sound of the music belie the actual serious or sarcastic message within. That pretty much sums up all three of these songs. All three feel like sunny, optimistic tunes, but are really deep and somewhat dark ideas hidden behind the trappings of a hit song. Yeah, take that mass audience, you're going to learn something while you're listening to Top 40 radio. I bet you never saw that coming!