Few musical artists have had the lasting impact and relevance of Talking Heads. One of the foundational bands of New York’s downtown 1970s music scene, Talking Heads have endured as a musical and cultural force for decades. Their unique brand of transcendent, experimental rock remains a lingering influence on popular music—despite their having disbanded over thirty years ago. Jonathan Gould offers an account of a band whose sound, fame, and legacy forever connected rock music to the cultural avant-garde.
Well-wrought, insightful ... Gould is a superb stylist, and the only misstep in this readable and well-researched book is his argument that Byrne succeeded as a musician because he had autistic tendencies that made his alienated stage presence distinctive.
The remit should be to illuminate the unexplored corners, the hidden details and anecdotes that provide a more full-bodied narrative and ultimately bring the band into sharper relief than ever before. Unfortunately, Jonathan Gould has almost completely ignored this directive in Burning Down the House, his new Talking Heads biography. This lumpy book, full of redundant stories and unnecessary detours that provide little illumination but plenty of needless bulk, lacks participation by the group’s members and is not the biography that this great and important band deserves.
The story of this band...has been taken up before ... But never been told as fully and vividly as Jonathan Gould tells it ... Gould...writes with clarity and musical acumen on a period in American musical history that rock writers tend to romanticize and inflate ... Among the complicated subjects Gould handles with nuance is the matter of David Byrne’s psychology.
