Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Record Collector SEPTEMBER 2025 - by Jason Draper

TALKING HEADS: MORE SONGS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND FOOD: SUPER DELUXE EDITION

Foundation Course: Expanded edition of second album reveals how David Byrne & co. tightened their sound and made a record built to last.

From its wry title through to its deceptively fuss-free deployment, Talking Heads' second album wears its achievements lightly. Road-tightened from more than a year's worth of heavy gigging - including a stint in the UK supporting fellow CBGB OGs Ramones in the late spring of 1977 - the group knocked More Songs About Buildings And Food out in a matter of weeks across March and April the following year, in unfamiliar surroundings and with a brand-new playmate, both of which would go on to aid the Heads as they developed into a new-wave funk juggernaut. At the time of the album's recording, however, Compass Point Studios, in the Bahamas, was an untested facility, rented out to the band by Island Records' Chris Blackwell at a reduced rate, although producer Brian Eno, fresh from rewriting the rock rulebook with Bowie on the Low and "Heroes" albums, had firmly established himself as the future-shapers' future-shaper.

It was while in the UK that Eno and Talking Heads entered each others' orbits, the British "non-musician" sensing shared objectives while catching one of the band's May 1977 headline shows, and the New York City four-piece noting a kindred spirit the following day, when, during a visit to Eno's flat, their new comrade played them Fela Kuti's Afrodisiac album. As bassist Tina Weymouth recalls in the liner notes to this super-deluxe edition reissue of More Songs About Buildings And Food, a shared taste in literature sealed the deal, and in March '78, band and producer decamped to Nassau for sessions that would see Talking Heads take a significant step towards realising their full potential.

Body-snatching rhythms and brow-furrowing reading habits: these twin interests tangle themselves around one of the central questions behind More Songs About Buildings And Food: how to reconcile the instinctual pull of corporeal pleasures with the intellectual allure of cerebral pursuits. As Byrne notes on the album's second track, With Our Love, mere glances from women can befuddle young men, so perhaps it's simply better to keep your head down and focus on the task in hand. "I won't look / I've got other things to do now," he sings, but drummer Chris Frantz's skittish hi-hat and Byrne and Jerry Harrison's antsy guitars belie the repressed energy behind such determined efforts towards self-distraction.

Still, from opener Thank You For Sending Me An Angel onwards, Byrne is an exemplar for those who find satisfaction through work, particularly when such labours are artistic in nature. Riding in on a galloping beat that exposes an unlikely debt to country music (an earlier version of the song, included on a disc's worth of alternate takes, features twangy guitar in place of the subtle electric piano woven into the final mix), he declares, like a post-punk career consultant, "Oh, baby, you can walk, you can talk just like me," before ending the whole exhilarating rush barely two minutes later with a gauntlet thrown: "Show me what you can do."

For the next forty minutes, Talking Heads do exactly that. Emerging, post-Talking Heads: 77, as a truly sympatico rhythm section, Frantz and Weymouth hold the grooves in place, allowing Harrison and Byrne to add their wiry, scratchy guitars and synth embellishments on top. While some of the More Songs About Buildings And Food material dates to the writing sessions for 77, the group show an elevated approach to arranging that ensures the album is no mere Part 2. On Artists Only, Byrne yelps his way through the frustrations of the creative process ("Pretty soon now, I will be bitter / You can't see it till it's finished"), while a gear shift into spy-theme riffing adds a subversive twist that looks beyond the world of striving artists in the Lower East Side lofts of late-'70s Manhattan and towards anyone for whom seemingly minor (to the observer) tasks can feel like insurmountable missions.

A turnaround of a different sort comes with the group's cover of Al Green's Take Me To The River, which, like Thank You For Sending Me An Angel and the album's other country-indebted song, closing track The Big Country, makes clear their ability to refashion their source material into something entirely new. Slowed down, at Eno's recommendation, to a lithe strut, and with a shift in emphasis from the third to the first beat, it's about as sensual as Talking Heads get. Giving the group their first hit single, it also allowed, briefly, for the primacy of the hips over the head.

The two are given equal standing on Found A Job, whose outro jam - complete with a more assured re-deployment of the cautious steel pan that infiltrated 77's Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town - hints at the powerhouse workouts that would reach a peak in the group's live shows of the early to mid-'80s. It's fitting that the band cut loose so joyously on a song that resolves Byrne's opposing preoccupations: as he sings of fictional couple Judy and Bob, who, bored with drab TV offerings, set out to produce their own shows and therefore "save their relationship", it's hard not to hear a guiding principle for Talking Heads' very existence: if the art you seek doesn't exist, create it yourself.

Bringing Eno on board only furthered those intentions. Asked to recreate the snare-drum sound that Tony Visconti had achieved on Bowie's Low album, Eno, lacking the Eventide Harmonizer with which Visconti discovered a way to "fuck with the fabric of time", alighted on his own mutant dub noise for Warning Sign - one of many post-production treatments that point to the deconstructivist underpinnings of follow-up album Fear Of Music. On early takes of I'm Not In Love (slathered in squelch) and Found A Job (crowded with delay effects) you hear how judicious restraint and the fastidious dispositions of all involved would make the final songs, like the words Byrne brings to them, seem somehow both precise and spontaneous at the same time.

Recorded ten months on from the live gig included with last year's reissue of Talking Heads: 77, the group's August 10, 1978 performance at New York City's Entermedia Theatre finds them working towards striking this balance on stage. Though more muscular on this tour, they're far from the funky fluidity of their 1984 live peak. And while Electricity, fleshed out from an instrumental idea recorded during the More Songs About Buildings And Food sessions, now features all-but-finished lyrics, the song's country-fied noodle bears scant resemblance to the hallucinogenic soundscape that would make for its final incarnation, as Fear Of Music's closer, Drugs. More mind-bending enhancements were imminent, and Talking Heads would soon evolve into something more elementally themselves.