[TR24][OF] Talking Heads - Speaking In Tongues - 1983 / 2011 (New Wave, Pop Rock, Funk)

David Byrne – vocals, keyboards, guitars, synthesizer, percussion
Chris Frantz – drums, backing vocals, synthesizer
Jerry Harrison – keyboards, synthesizer, guitars, backing vocals
Tina Weymouth – bass guitar, backing vocals, synthesizer, guitar
Additional musicians
Wally Badarou – synthesizer on "Burning Down The House", "Swamp" and "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)"
Raphael DeJesus – percussion on "Slippery People", "I Get Wild/Wild Gravity" and "Pull Up the Roots"
Nona Hendryx – backing vocals on "Slippery People"
Richard Landry – saxophone on "Slippery People"
Dolette McDonald – backing vocals on "Slippery People"
Steve Scales – percussion on "Burning Down The House" and "Moon Rocks"
L. Shankar – double violin on "Making Flippy Floppy"
David Van Tieghem – percussion on "I Get Wild/Wild Gravity" and "This Must be the Place (Naive Melody)"
Alex Weir – guitar on "Making Flippy Floppy", "Swamp", "Moon Rocks" and "Pull Up the Roots"
Bernie Worrell – synthesizer on "Girlfriend is Better"

Talking Heads found a way to open up the dense textures of the music they had developed with Brian Eno on their two previous studio albums for Speaking in Tongues, and were rewarded with their most popular album yet. Ten backup singers and musicians accompanied the original quartet, but somehow the sound was more spacious, and the music admitted aspects of gospel, notably in the call-and-response of "Slippery People," and John Lee Hooker-style blues, on "Swamp." As usual, David Byrne determinedly sang and chanted impressionistic, nonlinear lyrics, sometimes by mix-and-matching clichés ("No visible means of support and you have not seen nothin' yet," he declared on "Burning Down the House," the Heads' first Top Ten hit), and the songs' very lack of clear meaning was itself a lyrical subject. "Still don't make no sense," Byrne admitted in "Making Flippy Floppy," but by the next song, "Girlfriend Is Better," that had become an order -- "Stop making sense," he chanted over and over. Some of his charming goofiness had returned since the overly serious Remain in Light and Fear of Music, however, and the accompanying music, filled with odd percussive and synthesizer sounds, could be unusually light and bouncy. The album closer, "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)," even sounded hopeful. Well, sort of. Despite their formal power, Talking Heads' preceding two albums seemed to have painted them into a corner, which may be why it took them three years to craft a follow-up, but on Speaking in Tongues, they found an open window and flew out of it.