There is something genuinely weird about how comfortable True Stories makes you feel, and that weirdness is the whole point.
By 1986, David Byrne had already made some of the most restless, anxious, intellectually overcrowded pop music anyone had ever heard. Fear of Music, Remain in Light, the whole Brian Eno collaboration — that was art school as survival mechanism. Then he went to Texas to make a movie about people who never left home, and something loosened in him. The album that came out alongside the film is not the soundtrack. It is something stranger: a collection of songs performed by Talking Heads that Byrne had written for fictional townspeople to sing, songs about tabloid headlines and civic pride and a woman who hadn’t left her bed in years and liked it that way.
The Sessions
They recorded at Tracker Studios and the Complex in Los Angeles, with Steve Lillywhite producing — a left-field choice, maybe, for a band that had spent years pushing toward African rhythm and ambient texture. But Lillywhite had just finished Hounds of Love with Kate Bush, and he understood how to make big, unironic pop music feel genuinely felt rather than manufactured. The band played almost everything themselves, which was a return of sorts: no extended African percussion ensemble, no orchestra of overdubs. Tina Weymouth locked in on bass and gave tracks like “Love for Sale” a low-end that’s almost funky in the most Texas-roadhouse sense of the word.
Chris Frantz sat behind the kit for most of the record, and his playing here is some of his best — steady and unhurried, like he had nowhere else to be. Jerry Harrison contributed keyboards and guitar throughout, and you can hear him all over “Wild Wild Life,” which became the album’s unlikely hit, a song so deliberately goofy that it wraps back around to being genuinely joyful.
What Byrne Was After
The whole project orbited Byrne’s film of the same name, in which he drives a convertible through a fictional Texas town called Virgil. The movie is deadpan and kind and barely has a plot. The album operates the same way. It isn’t pointing at these people and laughing. “People Like Us” sounds like it was written from inside the belief system it describes, not above it. That is much harder to do than it looks.
“City of Dreams” might be the most beautiful thing on here, a slow hymn to the American landscape that sounds like it was recorded in a cathedral built out of pickup trucks. Byrne wrote it with Willie Williams, who handled lighting design for U2’s The Unforgettable Fire tour, and there is something of that big-sky evangelical feeling in the chord changes.
“Puzzlin’ Evidence,” which opens the record, features the gospel choir roar of the True Believers, a Fort Worth congregation Byrne actually recorded on location. You feel the room they were standing in.
The album got some critical eye-rolling at the time — too accessible, too easy, not Remain in Light. That response has aged poorly. True Stories is not Talking Heads coasting. It is Talking Heads deciding, for once, to love the thing they were describing instead of dissecting it. That is its own kind of discipline.