U Talkin’ U2 To Me? - U Talkin' Talking Heads 2 My Talking Head? - True Stories (w/ Ezra Koenig)

Episode Date: November 18, 2020

Singer-songwriter Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend joins Scott and Scott to discuss Talking Heads’ seventh studio album “True Stories.” They also talk about when Ezra first heard of Talking Heads, the moment Ezra realized Talking Heads were punk, and how Talking Heads influenced Ezra as a musician.

From E to Zimbra, this is You Talkin' heads to my talking head, the comprehensive and encyclopedic compendium of all things, talking heads. This is good. Rock and roll. Music. Sure is. Sure is. Sure is.

Welcome to the show. We're going to be talking. Was that, were you singing just then? Sounded really good. As a matter of fact, you know, singing is just speaking on pitch, my dear boy. And I certainly had a lot of that. But welcome to the show. This is a very special episode.

We're going to be talking about Talking Heads album, True Stories from 1986. We will be talking about that today. And we have a very special guest with us to talk about that. And he is the lead singer and songwriter of the incredible band Vampire Weekend. Ezra Koenig will be here with us to talk about this record that's uh an incredible get and um talking about this record i mean um an incredible get for us to be to be able to talk about this record not every day that you get to talk about this record that's all we're talking about a lot of records but not this one and so incredible to talk about this one um my name is scott

ackerman i am the host of you talking talking heads to my target what is our acronym u t t h 2 m t h is that what it would be that sounds right thank you you weren't keeping track of it it just sounds right to you you know it's sound it's like had a a real speaking of music it had a music to it that sounded musicality a certain rhythmic nature to it yeah like an oral aesthetic um by the way i gotta talk about uh when we talk about true stories i gotta talk about that the reissue was produced by Andy Zaks with Talking Heads. So make sure I don't forget to talk about that, okay? Okay, I'll make sure.

I'll remind you repeatedly. Who's Andy Zaks? Well, let's check him out. He's an American musician, historian, and a Grammy-nominated producer of music reissues. And he's got the most awesomeipedia picture where he's not looking into camera he's kind of looking off um andy zacks you're a legend we love you if you're listening um and uh he worked on uh the woodstock reissue in 2005 a lot of stuff but check out his wikipedia photo what's your wikipedia? I'm looking for it.

I'm looking for Andy's ex. His name. Oh, here we go. I've shared my screen. Why are you not just. I know, but I'm looking because yours is. Oh, yeah, that's a great photo. He looks like Tommy Wiseau in that photo. Yeah, he does look like Tommy Wiseau.

Blow it, like click on it and blow it up. It's like super grainy. Yeah, it's just a shitty photo well i can't complain about uh wikipedia photos because mine was so terrible for so long until i finally asked my listeners to because you can't change it because you have to own the photo or you have to attribute the photo to something or whatever so i couldn't i couldn't just upload one of my own for a long time because i didn't own, you know, the photographers own the photo. I understand.

Oh, my God. He's married to Lisa Jane Persky, I'll tell you that much, from The Great Santini and Peggy Sue Got Married. Sure. I do want to introduce my cohort. He is... Partner in crime. You can call me that. Partner in crime.

I like the sound of that. Definitely. Yeah. Definitely. We should commit crimes together. I agree. Like felonies. Like serious shit.

Yes. Yes. Stuff that we could be put away for like 150 years. I would love that. You know what I would love to do is I would love to co-adopt a baby with you. Yeah. And then watch it grow to maturity, learn to love it, and raise it until finally it graduates high school.

And then we pull a Felicity Huffman and lie about getting our son or daughter into college with you. I'd love to do that as a couple. That would be fun. I would get a charge out of that. I think the adrenaline is what, first and foremost, it would be the adrenaline rush for me.

I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm an adrenaline junkie. I was about to say the same thing about myself. I am an adrenaline junkie. I can't get enough of it like whether it's jumping out of an airplane or just having a really hot debate with a friend adrenaline oh my god when i have a hot debate with a friend or just a regular debate with a hot friend. Oh my God. Adrenaline. Adrenaline.

Adrenaline. Adrenaline. Pumping through my veins. Is that where it comes from? The veins? Adrenal glands. Your adrenal glands are inside your veins. Spoken like a true Hollywood celebrity,

knowing where those adrenal glands are. So you can- That's right. Adrenals. Adrenochrome. I love being able to just place exactly where they are too. I get adrenaline from that. Yeah. Life is full of adrenaline. Life is just one big rush. Is it not? It sure is. I get a big charge out of absolutely everything. from the moment I wake up in the morning,

that alarm clock, that gets the adrenaline just pumping, just pumping through my veins. Taking my first morning whiz, my first of two morning whizzes. Boom, boom, boom. Adrenaline. Or that's three morning whizzes.

Boom, boom, boom. Did I introduce you? I don't even know but he did i he's yeah let me do it i could do it again let me give you a better did i wait no i said that you were i don't even think i did it doesn't matter who cares people people don't know who you are you're talking people i gotta make saw the album cover because they buy the vinyl every two weeks when the show comes out. You think this is a record? Yeah, that's how people listen to it.

They get the record at the store and they bring it home and they put it on the record player. You think you're a musician? I'm a singer in a rock and roll band called Are You Talking Talking Heads to My Talking Head. Right? I have some bad news for you. Is that not right? No, you're just a podcast co-host. You're not even a podcast host.

Well, hold on a second. That actually sounds better than what I thought we were doing. What? Like, name another podcast. The Rolling Stones. No, again. Again, you are severely off base with this, Adam. I have to say, no.

This is a podcast which is basically just two dudes talking about music. And on this show, we talk about a band. I see. But that's okay, right? That's fine. As long as it means the bit ends, I'm fine with it. It's going to end right now. Okay.

He is the author of that bit that we just did. Welcome to the show, Adam Scott. Hello, Adam. Thank you very much. Thank you. You just waved at fans, at imaginary fans. Thank you. Or you were waving at fans, at imaginary fans. Thank you. Or you were waving at me and Kevin.

I'm not quite sure. But great to have you on the show. How do you feel about the album we're going to be exploring today? No spoilers, but how do you feel? No spoilers. God, how do I talk about this without using spoilers? I think it's good. No, I can't say that.

No, no, no, no, no. It has songs on. No, I can't say that there are songs on. You know, the single Wild Wild, no, I can't say that either. Just use colors.

Just explain your feelings in colors. Chartreuse. Okay, all right. Mixed with magenta. Magenta, fine. Burnt sienna. Burnt sienna, okay.

Essentially take an entire crayon box filled with, what's the biggest one that they make? 120 maybe? 120 crayons, all right. Yeah, and then just melt them together in the microwave. and 20 crayons, all right. Yeah, and then just melt them together in the microwave. That is the band Talking Heads, and you will have True Star.

Are you writing this down? What's going on? Yeah, I'm writing it all down. These aren't instructions. These aren't like directions. Aren't instructions, writing that down, okay. Please write that more at the top, though, because what I'm worried about

is you're going to do all of this. You're going to melt crayons in an actual microwave. And until you get to the part where it says, don't do this, you're going to be mid-doing all this, and you're going to ruin your microwave. Mid-doing this and ruin your microwave. Okay, what else? Can this bit end? What else? Can this bit end?

I think it's ending right now. I am excited to talk to our guest. We have not... Yeah. He came on the REM program. Yeah, he was on the REM program. And then we saw him live at the Hollywood Bowl, and we have not... I mean, I haven't spoken to him since then.

Hell no. I was so mad at him. Me too. For inviting us to that show. He's livid. I'm going to fucking tell him when he comes on here as well. I'm going to tell it to his face. Do it.

Well, his Zoom face. Fuck yeah. I'm not afraid. Who cares? Who cares? everything good in your life adam you uh you're in new york city obviously you're filming your new show which i've been reading about um and uh christopher walken christopher walken added to the cast and christopher walken john tutoro have you done your christopher walken impression to him yet? Hello. He loves it.

He loves it. This is the first thing I did when I met him. Hello. Yes. My wife. My wife. Hello, my wife. Jean Cui.

Jean Cui, Christopher Walken. Walken, Jean Cui. I'm walking here. I'll do that tomorrow. I'll do that tomorrow. Yeah, do Walken. Walken, jean-couille. I'm walking here. I'll do that tomorrow. I'll do that tomorrow. Yeah, do it tomorrow. Just go up to him and just say, do your best Christopher Walken,

but say, my wife, to him and see how he reacts. Don't say anything else. I love that. And could you tape record it? Could you tape record it just so we- Yeah, I'll video it. I'll ask him to video it oh okay could you like give him your phone turn on the camera and say like just hold

this up and tape me doing this to you he would love that i bet i'm sure i'm sure he'll love it have you ever considered being like a real eccentric person you know like like you know sort of what uh joaquin phoenix was like pretending to do with his whole thing but have you ever thought like boy if i you know during your adam quad where quadrero days could cordero cordero days uh did you ever think about any affectations that you could you could do i think i had many affectations in those days. Oh, my God. Boy, I mean, there were a lot. It's hard to—I'm trying to think.

What about you? I'm sure you were a pretentious 22-year-old or 20-year-old. 20-year-old. That's how old I was when I was going through the Cordero days. I've talked about this on another podcast, but when I went to acting college i um told everyone that i had a nickname that i didn't have oh god what was the nickname uh jackson i was like call me jackson and not because i wanted to be called jackson but because it was a joke yeah and then and instantly all of the teachers knew that I was fucking with them. And they, for six months, were like, can you just cut the... They were like trying different tactics on how to get me to stop it.

And they were like, you know, your name is sort of your calling card in this business. And you want to be known throughout your career as the thing you want to be professionally known at. So shouldn't you, you you know go back to your original name if that's what you're you know but no i just did it the entire time i was there at school and made oh my god friends call me that anyway that was my affectation that's pretty that's that's really embarrassing but really like sweet and funny for like a kid, you know? Yeah, no, I was too old for it. How old were you at that point? I was 20, 21.

That's a kid. I guess I'm a kid, yeah. At what point do you think someone stops being a kid? Like, I don't know, 57? The Heinz. Isn't that legally when you're not a kid anymore is 57? I think so, yeah. So you've never-

You get all that free ketchup. You've never dated anyone who's under 57, I hope. No, no, no. Of course not. Your wife is, how old is she? My wife. My wife, Christopher Walken. Do the Christopher Walken, my wife.

Hold on. Let me get into Christopher Walken somehow. My wife. What is he saying? What is, what's the way into Christopher Walken? It's like. Well, what's the like. Yeah, the Christopher Walken impression.

Hello. When was that that everyone was doing that? Was that like. It seemed like everyone did it on SNL. Like Jim Brewer must have done it. Yeah, somewhere. Hello. Jay Moore.

Jay Moore. Hello. Hello. Is that what it was? Yeah, yeah. Hello, my wife. Yeah, wife yeah that's something like that really solid what about yoda doing anthony kidis doing oh for walking doing borat hello okay first of all yoda trying to yoda trying to do christopher walk and let's

take it to that level so he's like, this is just regular Yoda. He's like, Hello, Yoda I am. Christopher Walken impression I shall do. Hello. Hello, hell. Hello, hell. Okay, now add the level of

Christopher Walken doing Borat onto Yoda. I hated, just as a sidebar i hated in the prequels when yoda started talking in that like switching up the the beginnings of sentences you know because in the origin in like empire strikes back and stuff he didn't really do that that much yeah but it became a thing. Oh, my God. In the prequels where he's spinning around and jumping all over the room with the lightsaber. This is like the eighth time you've brought this up on this show.

Is it really? Is it? You hate this with such a passion. I've never talked about the sentence construction. No, but you've talked about Yoda spinning around. How much I hate Yoda. Oh, God. I love that this is like the worst thing that's ever happened to you.

I hate that I hate that way more than I hate it. I hate that I hate it that much. All right, let's do Yoda doing Christopher Walken doing Borat. Okay, so let me get into Yoda again. Hmm, Yoda. Hello. My wife. Hello.

My wife. See, I can't even do Yoda, so it's hard to have you do, you know. You know what I'm saying. I do know what you're saying, and I will continue to know what you're saying as long as we choose to do this show, which is for a lifetime, I hope. I hope that we do this until we're old men and that we just continue to bro out about records that were put out in the 80s and 70s forever. It's important that we keep doing this. Well, look, we have a big show and a lot to talk about with our guest, Ezra from Vampire Weekend.

So I want to take a break a little bit early and then bring him on. Is that okay? Yeah. Because we have a lot to talk about with him. So we're going to go to a break. Yeah, because we have a lot to talk about with him. So we're going to go to a break. When we come back, we will have Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend talking about the 1986 record True Stories.

We will be right back with you talking talking heads to my talking head. In just a moment, we'll be right back. Welcome back. You talking talking heads to my talking head. And very exciting episode today. As mentioned, it would be weird if I mentioned it and then it didn't actually happen. Or if you hadn't mentioned it and this is the first time anyone's hearing of it,

that would be way cooler. I should go back. I guess I don't mean go back into the episode and re-record it, but go back in time. Gotta get back in time. I warn myself not to mention who our guest is. That's a good use of time travel, right? Yeah.

You know, maybe check out- Great Scott. Baby Hitler while I'm at it. Don't you do the Christopher, what's his name? Don't you do the Doc Brown impression? Haven't you done that before? Yes, I have done the Doc Brown impression a few times, yes. Is that part of your act?

When you say my act, what exactly do you mean? I don't know that I have an act. No, your stand-up set you do that's all impressions. Yes, of course. I will tell you one time I went to Universal Studios and took the tour with Doug Benson, And he had been a tour guide there for many years. And so he knew everything that was going to happen. So when we went into the Back to the Future special effects room, the tour guide said, okay, we'll need a Valen. And he immediately

said, right here, and raised his hand. they said oh okay yeah sure you and he went back and we were all wondering what was happening and he came back out dressed as doc brown they dressed the volunteer up like doc brown and then doug benson just did a doc brown impression the entire time going okie doke and all sorts of stuff it was very very funny and they were usually the the tour guides are used to you know people who are shy and they get like and he was just like ruining it for everybody but um speaking of ruining it for everybody here's a guy who is not going to do that um on this episode he uh was on our uh sister show uh the uh which one was he on? Oh, the REM one, wasn't he?

That's right. That's right. And now he is on this new podcast, brand new podcast, totally unrelated to that REM show. He is a big Talking Heads fan from what I've been led to believe. And you know him as the lead singer. Do you consider yourself to be the lead guitarist?

That's an interesting question. Is it? Yeah. Is it? But is it, though? The minute I said it, I was like, this is not interesting. Well, maybe, yeah. It's hard to say.

I think I am the lead guitarist on the records generally, not so much live. Okay. Especially lately. Interesting. By the way, and we'll talk about this, but Adam and I saw you live in between your appearance on our sister REM show and this podcast.

Oh, right. And your guitarist looks like my old friend Reggie Watts. In any case, we'll get to that after I introduce you. He is the lead guitarist on albums, but not live. Definitely not live. With a band called Vampire Weekend. Please welcome back to the show, or welcome for the first time to this show, and welcome back to doing a show with us, Ezra Koenig. Hello. Hey, what's up, guys? Hey, man. Hey, what's up? Thank you for doing this. Thanks for having me. You are a musician, Ezra. You are an accomplished musician. You have put out some of the best albums of the 2000s.

You are, a lot of your work incorporates world rhythms, much like Talking Heads has. And all of this, you know, you're a guy with experience. You know what it takes to create an album, to go and tour an album, to take pictures for the album, to work on artwork for the covers. And essentially, what Adam and I were wondering for the first question is, when did you first hear of Talking Heads? I kind of always knew Talking Heads because my dad was a fan. So, my dad had the first four records. So, I kind of remember, you know, what age would that have been? Like, nine or 10 or 11 hearing, like, Psycho Killer. That was definitely the first song that I was into. Spooky. hearing um like psycho killer that was definitely the first song that i was into and being like whoa

yeah this song's fun and weird and um and then as i got older i like dug deeper into the into the other records but like yeah i can vividly remember looking at the first four records and obviously they all have like really striking covers so yeah they were always in the house they were in the house and what what does your father do i i don't recall if we talked about that the last time you were on the show. I can't remember if we did. His main job, he's retired now, but his main job was working as a set dresser on TV and movies in New York. Now, a lot of people who don't know what that means, he didn't dress up like a dresser in a bedroom and then just sit there on the set. He actually, what would he do?

and then, you know, in a bedroom and then just sit there on the set. He actually, what would he do? Well, he would help construct the sets to some degree, keep them tidy, deal with continuity. He's always taking Polaroids and then later, you know, iPad pictures. So making sure that everything, yeah. And I guess he also was a prop man at some point. I think there's interaction between those departments.

But yeah, dealing with props and how the set looks and how everything is placed. And did you get to go visit sets and stuff when you were a kid? Yeah, a few times. He worked on a bunch of Spike Lee movies in the 90s, including Malcolm X. Lee movies in the 90s, including Malcolm X. And I have a memory of going with my family to 125th Street in Harlem when they were shooting Malcolm X and being, you know, just being really struck by all the old cars and everything they had there. And then, yeah, I have one other memory of him shooting in Jersey, close to where we lived. He worked on this Todd Sollins movie called Storytelling. Oh, yes. Remember that one?

I do. The Bill and Sebastian soundtrack. And so there was a scene where that Conan O'Brien was in. It's like this kind of bizarre fantasy scene that Conan was in. And so I remember watching that and just being like, whoa, Conan. One day I'm going to play on his show. That was the dream. Yeah, I can only imagine.

Did your father hope that you would become the, you know, get into the family business? And one other question, being the son of a prop man, do you know what prop stands for? What prop stands? It's short for... It's for property property proposition proposition oh proposition prop 102 um all right yeah i'd switch topics i'm sorry i was i'm talking about politics now um so uh so he always got really political. Yeah, sorry. I apologize to our listeners. We don't usually get this political on the show. So you had it in the house, and you got into it around 10 or 11.

And what years were those? Not to, I don't know whether you tell your age on the internet, but what are we talking? Is that the late 80s, early 90s, somewhere in there? I was born in 1984, so I would have been, yeah, I would say the mid-90s. I was getting pretty into, yeah, like starting out with Psycho Killer, and definitely by the time I was 14, 14, 15, then I was like very interested in like the history of punk and new wave. So at that point

I was like a serious Talking Heads fan. Okay. And at this point in your life, they are not, or they are no longer an ongoing concern. They had broken up. So you didn't get to really experience it as it was happening. So you have a unique perspective that a lot of our guests don't have. Adam and I, of course, got to know them late around Stop Making Sense. And we weren't experiencing it in the early part of the career in the moment either. So you got really into that period of music. And tell us about what became your favorite of all of their records. At some point, I remember, you know, now that I'm older, I do have affection just for their

whole career. But there's definitely a point where Fear of Music was my favorite. I decided that was their most interesting album. Like it seemed like kind of a sweet spot for me, especially because like at that time, once you got like too deep into the 80s, even though now I love it, like speaking in tongues and beyond, there was something about the production that just like wasn't for me at that time. Was that because shinier and slicker? Yeah.

Was it because you were into you were getting into the punk era and you liked things that were a little more challenging at the time? Yes. was easier at that age for me to understand like the the david byrne character as like this like paranoid weirdo than the kind of like fun funky one yeah although now i appreciate all of it but for instance i remember it took me a long time to get into stop making sense because i think i might have been at summer camp or something and and i was like oh i like talking heads i'd never heard that album because my my parents didn't have it. And somebody played that Psycho Killer that opens it, you know, the live Psycho Killer.

And I was just so used to hearing the tight electric guitar, you know, 77 one that I was just like, oh. So I couldn't wrap my head around the cool, funky live band. That's the opposite of Adam. Because Adam, when we played the original recording, he's like, I like the Stop Making Sense one a little better. Yeah, because I grew up with Stop Making Sense and then dug into it when I got into their earlier records. My mom had an opinion, I guess, or a theory, more of a theory, which I always thought was very interesting. She said that you like the first thing that you hear. Like whatever you're used to, you like that.

So even if it's the worst version, you know, you're just so used to it that, like, I forget why. I think we were talking about the little Chop of Horrors soundtrack or something. And I was a big fan of the Broadway version for four years before the movie came out. And then when the movie came out, I'm like, this isn't very good. She was like, yeah, you like the first thing you hear.

Oh, yeah. No, I think that's totally true. You're just more comfortable with it. You could do the exact same arrangement, song. So when we reached out to you about being on the show, though, you picked this album. Of course, we're talking about True Stories, the album on this episode. You picked this album as the one that you wanted to talk about. Why exactly is that?

I'm pretty sure you guys told me there weren't that many left. Well, yeah, it may have been that. I think I told Ezra. I think I gave him like two or three choices. I think by the time we reached out to you, maybe we were almost at the end of the show. I think all the Stone Cold classics were taken. Yeah.

But I do think this is an interesting album. Like, yeah, I definitely, I spent, I had to revisit it. But yeah, you know, like I think you'd gone through the first four yeah um but I yeah I think true stories it's I think it's an interesting one to talk about yeah definitely well before we get to that yeah uh I do want to ask just about, mainly because Mr. Burns, lead singer of Talking Heads, he incorporates a lot of world music influences into his work in the same way that you do. Is there any sort of kinship there? Was there any sort of inspiration listening to some of the later Talking Heads records or his solo records? Oh, I mean, well, definitely all of it.

I think the, yeah, I was always a fan of him as a human being and I was a big fan of Talking Heads. And, you know, this might sound like a naive thing. It depends how people look at music. But it's also, for me, it was very interesting when I realized that talking heads were punk. Like, you know, when I was like a tween, and I'm starting to get interested in music, because in the mid 90s, there was a punk revival, and it was like, pop punk, or there were, you know, or there was still like, kind of gutter punk. So basically, when I was a kid, or when I was becoming a teenager, the, for me, for most people around me,

punk either meant, like, Green Day and post-Green Day, or it meant kind of, like, people with, like, you know, a studded leather jacket, like, a subhuman's patch on it, and a mohawk, like, and, you know, I like all that that stuff but that's such a hyper specific version of punk that you know i start like reading books or something and being like punk you know one of the earliest punk clubs is cbgb's and you're like oh who played there and it's like talking heads and then you look at a picture of them and you see them all like david burn wearing like a button-down shirt and and so it almost struck me as recognized, I was kind of like learning that there's this like alternate history of kind of like perhaps preppy, you know, button shirt punk that, you know, talking heads in the UK is like Elvis Costello, things that a lot of like the punk kids I knew weren't really interested in. So to realize that that was punk, that just made me think about the connections between music very differently.

So talking at 77, even just to think of that music as being punk music, that was like a major perspective shift for me. And then getting into like the later stuff and seeing the way that they changed, you know, it's like an amazing discography to, to study. Because if you look at how, how every record changed, it's like, it's pretty amazing. It's a, you know, even more so than the, the music having an influence on you. Yeah. I was thinking about the fashion choices because when Vampire Weekend came

out, you guys were sort of using a preppy aesthetic uh or a kind of wes anderson kind of clothes aesthetic in a way was that it felt to me like talking heads were doing that in order to not be pigeonholed in the punk scene uh the way that you know people who dress like the sex pistols or the clash were were were. Were you doing it in a similar way? Well, yeah, I found it kind of funny. And I also did find the history of all those clothes to be interesting. And yeah, it just kind of seemed like a kind of rich world to explore. But yeah, the fact that there was this history of bands like the Togging Heads and then like, I don't know, like the feelies and stuff.

I just kind of realized like, Oh, as much as in that time and indie music and stuff, I felt like nobody's wearing, this is so like lame to say, cause it's so basic, but nobody was wearing like button down shirts. And then suddenly you can start looking at like interesting people from music throughout history, like a David Byrne, even like a Thurston Moore. It's just like always wearing like, and you're kind of like, oh yeah, but- Like Oxfords and khakis.

Yeah. You're like, there is a kind of funny, cool history of that, which struck me at the time, perhaps naively, as almost like a secret history where I was like, oh yeah, there's a whole like button, button down shirt wave. Like there's a whole Dan Brown kind of Da Vinci code, button down shirt wave like there's a whole dan brown kind of da vinci code button down shirt exactly thing that could that could lead you to what actual you know rock and roll music actually is yeah and i think it's it's about oxford oxford button downs i think i encapsulated your point pretty well there um did you hear that did you hear that story about why uh david mr burns wears uh wears uh long sleeve shirts it's because Lou Reed

saw him on stage wearing a short sleeve shirt and he's got really dark hair on his forearms and Lou Reed was like hey man you gotta start wearing long sleeve shirts that's pretty gross oh god I never heard that before well

it's I'm actually glad we're talking to you about this record because i think something about it definitely reminds me of of your work in a way um and so i'm glad we're we're here to talk to you about it let's go through a little bit of uh the stats behind the record all right uh let's see comes out on september 15 1986 ezra is two years old at that point or that's yeah two two when's your birthday uh april 8th april 8th so you're like two and a half nice so you have uh no memory of buying this record in the stores when it came out oh definitely not how about you adam buying this record in the stores when it came out? Oh, definitely not.

How about you, Adam? Were you in the stores when this came out? I remember my brother was like into the Talking Heads or into Talking Heads. And I remember Little Creatures was a big deal. And this day of release, he went and got the vinyl because that's how we bought everything how he bought everything and i just i remembered this artwork in a huge vinyl form was really striking and yeah the artwork take a look at the album cover uh while you're listening to this podcast and really really stare at it yeah um for a long time pause the podcast and go find the vinyl. Yeah, go out to some sort of vinyl shop. Maybe go on Record Store Day.

So pause this show right now. Wait until the next Record Store Day comes around. Buy this on vinyl. They should download it, though, just in case there's a power outage or something or they're in a bad area coverage-wise and they can listen to it. They can unpause it at any time.

Oh, download this podcast? Yeah. Download the rest of the podcast. Yeah, definitely download it to save for later. It is very striking. Has been copied a few times, I believe, by other bands, but half- Well, this font really came back

in the early-ish, mid-'90s, like Natural Born Killers, came back like in the mid early-ish mid-90s like yeah natural born killers and even monster kind of took this this font a little 10 episodes in we're talking about fonts now jesus fucking christ um so you uh he went your brother went out and bought it yeah and i remember listen love for sale just that that the way it starts just just the whole album just starts with with drums and it's uh it's really uh like this is a kind of an it's sort of taking that little creatures americana thing and and pushing it uh a little further don't you think speaking of drums uh chris farts in his book, he talks about how the one

compliment Mr. Burns ever gave him was on those on, I believe it was Love for Sale. Oh, really? He listened to the track back and he went, huh, nice drums. And that's the one compliment supposedly he ever gave Chris Farts.

And then Chris Farts has to say, well well they were more than nice but uh it was nice to hear that he liked them um have you read uh chris farts's book as no now well now that you mention it that came out recently right yeah it came out a few months back yeah you know i i read that he had a book out and i was like i bet i would enjoy that but so this is a good reminder isn't that interesting that we read about books? Like instead of just reading the book, we should just read the book. Why do we have to read about a book?

Like let's eliminate the middleman here. It's a really, really good, important thought. No, I feel you. So glad someone said it. Well, I feel you. You gotta read the book. Adam, you were saying that it kind of takes what they were doing on Little Creatures. So let's talk about the background a little bit.

So Mr. Burns had moved to Los Angeles, California because he wanted to make a movie. And he got a house up in the Hollywood Hills. And he got a house up in the Hollywood Hills. And so the band, they recorded this and Little Creatures back to back. So basically they recorded Little Creatures, which we covered on one of our last episodes, and they mixed it in New York. And then they, as soon as the mixing was done, like, I guess like within five minutes after the mixing was done, they went into the studio and started recording this. And so they're kind of interesting companion pieces in a way because they made them sort of like the Lord of the Rings movies. They made them simultaneously. Or like Back to the Future 2 and 3, speaking of Doc Brown.

Mm-hmm. It's a cool tie-in there. They did the basic tracks in New York and then came out to Toluca Lake to record. Which is weird. I wonder where that studio is. I looked it up. Do you know where that is? I looked it up.

Okay, so it's the old O. Henry Sound Studio, which is no longer there, I think. And Chris Fartz in his book is talking about like um how someone told him that bob hope lived next door and that is in first of all i used to live in toluca lake i used to live on bob hope street bob hope bob hope studios is what he's thinking of by the way bob hope used to go into the bob's big boy there in Toluca Lake. Every single night, my friend told me from like 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. when he was 94, 95 or something like that. And he used to just chill. And people would know that.

They would go like, oh, yeah, if you want to go meet Bob Hope, just go to the Bob's Big Boy. I never did it. Whoa. You a big Bob Hope fan, Ezra? You know, I'm really not very familiar with this word i can like picture him like not a golf club watch the uh watch road to utopia that's uh the best road movie and the most uh meta one it's it's really really funny because he made who was

like the sidekick in those bing crosby well they were i mean you know not necessarily a sidekick in those Bing Crosby well they were I mean you know not necessarily a sidekick I mean that's like you know I it's interesting that's how you view anyone else who shares the spotlight with you as a sidekick no that's just how I view Bing Crosby understandable so he's not like the short round to uh short round holds up doesn't it oh yeah you watch those indie movies there's nothing offensive about i still think that in the next indiana jones movie um they should have short round all grown up and he's like jet lee or someone and he just kicks fucking ass i heard that's what they're doing really yeah okay he hugh Kwan is going to- Is? Really? That's what I heard just recently. I am into it.

I don't know if that's real. I am fucking into it. Me too. Okay. So they went out to Toluca Lake to mix it and do overdubs, I guess. And then there's a story in Chris Farts' book where Mr. Burns flew them out and put them up in, like, the shittiest motel. Well, I mean, I've read a little bit that things, the last few years of the Talking Heads' career were very tense,

and they weren't really, like, talking. They weren't talking to each other. But I guess that's what he's talking about. Everything seems kind of, like like fine at this point and none of the books i've read say there were any like open hostility like there was in some of the records they made but it just seems like mr burns was keeping them at arm's length because chris farts talks about like well he never invited us to his home for even not even for a drink um we invited him to eat sushi several times and he said he was too

busy so it just seems like mr burns is like keeping them at arm's length and and it's it's become more of a business at this point and he has like cool hollywood friends or it seemed like there was like a a bit of uh just hurt feelings yeah well also every everything they say in the press about him is so mean that like if it were me right i'd be like oh god fuck these guys but i don't know i haven't spent any significant time with david byrne but obviously um obviously i'm a huge fan but i when i picture something like that i could imagine i could equally imagine them inviting him out and him being like oh no i'm busy and he's like, oh, no, I'm busy. And he's going to hang out with whatever big movie stars there were at that time.

But I could equally imagine him going, oh, I'm busy. Sylvester Stallone. And just go home and stare at the wall. Yeah. He could either be ditching them for Sylvester Stallone or ditch them to go just sit at his house and just think. Take photos of a spatula. Yeah, he's an idiosyncratic guy so i'm sure yeah some percentage of the the issues they had with each other weren't just like pure

like headbutting it might have just been like a uh a tone thing well it's kind of the same issues i have with adam i've invited him over to this place several times he's never taken me up on it um he moved to new york to get away from me there you go obviously it's not working um let's see what else happened oh yeah one uh interesting thing of note according to chris farts's book is that uh someone uh dropped by the studio while they were recording it it was the six million dollar man himself aka the fallk.a. the fall guy, Lee Majors. I don't remember shit from this book.

Lee Majors came to the studio when they were recording this? Lee Majors dropped by, said he was a big fan, and they were like, cool. Lee Majors? Yeah. One other interesting thing is that the O. Henry Sound, where they were doing all the overdubs,

there in Toluca Lake, the person who owned that sold his house to a major singing star of the current era. Can you guess who it is? His Toluca Lake compound. Who sold it?

The person who ran the studio that they were in in Toluca Lake. He sold his house to somebody who's a major singer now? Yeah. Any other hints other than his major star than i will give you one other hint her sister's name is wouldn't want to be you oh see ya yes why is it her sister

they're twins okay see ya and wouldn't want to be this is see ya and wouldn't want to be uh so i i thought that was an interesting uh when i was looking up where oh henry sound was uh those were like the first four it was that sold the house the dude who the dude who ran this studio the dude who ran the studio who owned dude who ran the studio. Who owned the studio. They recorded this in. That is no longer there. He's no longer with us. And he's dead. He must have been.

You went deep. Well, I mean, I looked at, this is as deep as I went. I said, Siri, look up O'Henry Sound, Toluca Lake. And then the first four articles were about Sia buying this guy's house. Okay. So he must have been, that must have been a very successful studio, you know? Yeah. I imagine Sia would have like a baller pad in Toluca Lake.

Well, I think it may have been her second house or something, but it was like a $5 million house at the time. And this was like seven years or so ago. So yeah, I mean, do studio owners, I mean, you know this better than anyone, Ezra. Do studio owners usually have that kind of capital? Definitely not these days. Not anymore, yeah. I guess back then, yeah, I don't know, maybe you made some wise investments.

I wonder if wouldn't want to be ever comes by. I mean, $5 million, that's like 50,000 bozos, Adam. Oh, listen, I don't know if we can even count the bozos. I think I'm doing the math right. So they, then they, let's see, they also, they mixed it somewhere else. I don't know.

We're getting into the weeds about all the mixing of it. But apparently, according to them, Let's talk more about the real estate venture. Yes. The guy that used to own a studio. I thought it was an interesting studio. I got a question. Did David Byrne buy a house in the Hollywood Hills or did you say he was

renting? He, I believe he bought, although, uh, I'm going to have to go back, uh, and do some research on that,

but I believe he bought a house up in the Hills and by all accounts, he really liked moving to California. Interesting. Do you, you're, you're an East coast guy and you live in California, do you not? Yes, technically. Do you like to tell people your address or could you do that on the show for us? No, I try to keep that quiet. Oh, okay. No problem.

So you have a lot in common with Mr. Burns there. a lot in common with mr burns there um this uh this came out and uh was uh the the song wild wildlife was the first single and was a big big hit yeah that's the thing is is for like a lesser what's thought of as like a lesser or that's how i was thinking of it and having not revisited in a while and there's so many really like great songs on this yeah it it wild wildlife was a big hit but the album sort of flopped it only it did yeah it only went gold it only uh sold 500,000 copies at this point whereas the at the time was not but the previous was double platinum the previous sold two million yeah so and chris farts even talks about how uh he thought mr burns was overexposed um there was a lot i guess mr burns got his own press agent and separate from the band and and started

doing a ton of press little moves like that can bad sign yeah yeah and then he was on the cover of time as rock's renaissance man and it took 1,500 words in the article before Talking Heads was even mentioned, I guess. And that kind of soured the group against him even further. And then Chris Farts talks about how he just thought that once you're that overexposed and once you're doing that much press, there's no mystery anymore. And people get less interested rather than more interested but mr burns was like thought it would be good for the band thought it would be good for the movie and so he did like a ton of he didn't refuse any press yeah okay so it it came out the band was in um the band was in the videos oh yeah the one thing

that uh is interesting when they were making the videos i think it was the same crew in the videos. Oh yeah. The one thing that is interesting when they were making the videos, I think it was the same crew as the movie true stories and talking heads guys came and did the wild wildlife video. And the crew came up to Chris farts and Tina very mouth and said like, wow, you guys were awesome. And we heard you were going to, you were huge divas and we're gonna

be a problem and they said well who told you that and they like gestured over to mr burns and the same thing happened on the next uh video which was for maybe it was for love for sale i can't remember but the exact same thing happened where in the middle of the, this is all according to Chris Farts, in the middle of shooting, Mr. Burns shouted cut in the middle of a take, which incensed the director. And the director was like, only I say cut in the middle of takes. And then after the shoot, the crew came up to Chris Farts

and Tina Verimouth and George Harrison and said, hey, you guys were so good and we heard you were huge divas and we're going to be like such assholes to us. It's so weird. And they said, who told you that? And then they go, the guy who yelled cut in the middle of the take. So, yeah. What a weird thing. Like, even if you're not totally getting along and there's tension in your band to just be like to poison the crew these people are gonna be total nightmares like because

there's like a 70 chance they're they're not and you're just gonna look like like what a weird gamble that's what happened it's weird that undermines my theory that Burn was just kind of like in his own weird world. Maybe, although this is all according to Chris Farts, so we don't know. These are just, yeah, these are just one side of the story. When's that Burn book dropping? Well, I would love to hear his version of it. He, by the way, I read... He just goes in.

I read an interview with him recently where they asked him about Chris Farts' book and he just, he had the perfect answer with it where he just said, no, I haven't read it mainly because in doing press for American Utopia, I know that's all anyone would ever ask me about. So I didn't want to have any opinion on it, which I think is like perfect, you know? Did you see American Utopia by the way, Ezra? No, I didn't. I missed it and I haven't watched it on, I haven't streamed it yet either.

I should have before coming on the program. Yeah, I don't mean to put a lot of guilt on you. You can pause this recording and go watch it and then come back. All right, you guys, sit tight. Okay. And we're back. All right, you guys, sit tight. Okay. And we're back. Hey, so what'd you think?

Incredible. Redefines the filmed concert experience. I would say 10 to 20 times better than Stop Making Sense. Wow. Mr. Burns is an absolute treasure. And he just seems like a good guy. No, I've seen clips of it. And everybody's told me, I know some people who worked on it, like some, I think our lighting dude also worked on it. He's worked on a lot of stuff.

Oh, cool. Well, it's also Spike Lee. So maybe you know some of the prop people. Oh, yeah. Damn. Maybe if my dad hadn't retired, he could have gotten a gig. Yeah. Damn. Maybe if my dad hadn't retired, he could have gotten a gig. I think a lot of retired people think that. If only I hadn't retired, I could have still kept working. Exactly. I didn't know when I was retired, I wouldn't be working anymore. No, but it's cool. And a bunch of people sent me a still image from American Utopia because there's a dude in the audience wearing a Vampire Weekend shirt. So, I just want to say, sir, you stole the show. Shout out to the guy in the Vampire Weekend shirt. Well, instead of just looking at one still, you should look at

approximately 24 of them per second for about two hours and watch the entire thing. Hey, Ezra, what other Spike Lee movies did your dad work on? thing hey Ezra what other Spike Lee movies did your dad work on uh he did uh he also worked on Crooklyn um which I remember seeing as a kid um and he worked on uh 25th hour I love that one I love um I love Crooklyn too yeah Crooklyn was super cool I remember seeing that when it came out um were there others? Definitely those. But yeah, it made a big impact on me because being part of that world, we were on the mailing list, or our household was. So we received Kwanzaa cards from 40 Acres and a Mule Productions.

So I'd like to see that. And also the crew gear was all insane yeah my dad had this a leather malcolm x world tour jacket that was like unbelievable and um there was like a cool i think it was like a nike sweatshirt from crooklyn but basically what i'm saying these artifacts like loomed large you know stuff in your. I'm sure you would like stare at that stuff and be like, whoa, that's so cool. Yeah. Amazing. I remember 40 Acres and a Mule had a shop on Melrose back in like 92.

Oh, in LA? They had an LA store? Yeah, in LA they had a store. And I used to go there all the time because I was so into Spike Lee and I would go, but I couldn't afford anything. Like everything was super expensive like hats and sweatshirts and stuff god I hadn't thought about that in so long but they had an actual store here and I knew they they have they had maybe still have the one in Fort Green in Brooklyn oh they do it's like they had the big big flag um yeah when you really think about it

that stuff was the idea of like having this having this, like, permanent merchandising arm for, like. Yeah. For, like, kind of grown-up movies. Now you get all this cool stuff, like, you know, online ceramics, making A24 stuff. Why doesn't Christopher Nolan come out with a store, you know? Just drop a store. With, like, moody. They could sell Batman costumes and interstellar spacesuits.

Quarters that you spin around. Or, no, what was it? It wasn't a quarter. It was like a jack. Yeah. No, the totem that you would- Yeah. That you could spin around to see if you're dreaming. Yeah, like a spinning top, like a spinning jack. That would be so- And then every single person that buys a totem from the Christopher Nolan store realizes that they're in a dream and they're not actually living their life. Whoa, that would be so trippy, man.

That would be a huge trip. All right, we need to take a break. When we come back, we're going to go through all the songs on the record and listen to them, and we'll talk about our impressions of them. That sounds pretty fun, doesn't it, guys? I mean, what do you think? Oh, yeah. go through all the songs on the record and listen to them and we'll talk about our impressions of them. That's, uh, that sounds pretty fun, doesn't it guys? I mean,

what do you think? Oh yeah. Okay. So we're going to be back. We will be right back with more. You talking, talking heads to my talking head we're here with ezra koenig of vampire weekend before we get into this record, True Stories,

I got to ask, new Vampire Weekend music, when's it coming? We're working on a record now, maybe the only bright side of the COVID pandemic of 2019. Does it give you more time to work on a record, or is it harder because you can't necessarily get together uh as much or i think we actually have a head start because we we were very sad to see all the the touring this year vanish because we we had a lot of shows we were looking forward to but i find it very hard to think about new music when we're touring so i think it allowed us to have a head start.

And then also, yeah, we've got a kind of like a decently dialed-in scenario. We can even like jam together sometimes in a way we sit in different rooms and kind of use headphones and go take a break, sit outside. So, you know, it's decent. And is there any adjustments to the sound of the record? Have you gone down any new avenues that you're looking at? Or will it be sort of similar to the last one, do you think, at this point? Oh, well, yeah, always going down new avenues.

Still in the embryonic stage, so I can't discuss too much. But that was something I, again, very few bright spots to you know the pandemic but the the first few months like many people filled with anxiety and stuff but i did find that just being at home for a few months that was a lot of time to think in a way that i probably couldn't have done if we're on tour you know when you're on tour you're playing all the old music and you're excited and stuff it's good to sometimes not not get any external stimulation just think what comes next that's great so yeah i mean it's almost like you're you're back into the same mind state as when you first started doing music in a way like you have nothing else to think about you know like i can

only imagine being in vampire weekend is a a little bit of a treadmill where you're planning the next thing a lot. And at this point, there is no next thing. So it's just like in terms of touring and photo shoots and videos and all that kind of stuff. At this point, it's like all you can concentrate on is songs. Totally. And I think if we'd been on tour, even on and off this year, I'd probably just now, I'd probably be getting home exhausted and starting to like, get back into thinking about this stuff. Because yeah, a whole album with all the touring that suddenly just years go by. And then, yeah, so luckily, we have the ability to get cracking. At this rate, if you guys, if we're not back to normal again for another year or so, your next tour could be touring, continuing your Father of the Bride tour, but also adding another record to the tour. Conceivably, maybe. Yeah, that's kind of what i hope i mean

luckily we got to hit most big cities around the world but some of that we were really looking forward to like playing some some like slightly smaller places like the you know missoula montana is in burlington vermont so it's like i the one bright side is to say like well we'll still get to those places but yeah we'll have even more music. So. Well, uh, Adam and I want to sing on the, on the new record. Is that something, uh, you you're interested in? Oh yeah, sure. I can get you, get you guys on some background vocals. That's what we want. Um, and that's non-negotiable. Seal that up. Yeah. That's definitely happening. Um, we did see you, uh, at the Hollywood bowl show that you did, and I think we've talked about it on this show, but it was such a great show.

So good. Oh, thanks for coming. Yeah, it was incredible. And thank you for extending the invitation to us. So we had a wonderful seat. Look, I think we got a hold of you pretty last minute to ask if we could come to the show. So I was expecting our seats to be, you know, like like pretty far off they were in the box next to your wife and it was like oh it was very we were next to heim and your wife and i was kind of like wow okay well it was so fun um it was so

good i'm sure i said i'm sure i said you do right by these men. You give them. A tear was coming down your face as you said that. And they said, how important are these guys to you? And I said, somewhere in between my wife and Chaim. On a level of between Chaim and my wife. And that was great. It was great. And my wife loved it. She's kind of more of a casual music fan

uh you know and she came out of it a true believer and was like oh my god oh that's awesome these guys are incredible uh just a wonderful that's such a nice night it was just like a vibey it wasn't hot were you guys having fun there i've i've talked to other friends of mine who have played there, and they kind of were like, eh, Hollywood Bowl, the sound's bad, or whatever. And I've never talked to anyone who's really enjoyed it. But were you having a good night there?

Well, this was our third time playing there. So I think I spread out over a decade. But I... About every 3.33 years? Exactly, yeah. And so being back there, it's our third time there. At this point, I know LA much better than I did when we first played there in 2010. And I've seen a million shows there. So I felt like I knew what to expect. So I love the Hollywood Bowl. I think it's an incredibly unique venue. And the thing that I think a lot of people have a hard time with there is that by having those boxes up front, which is an amazing way to watch a show, but by having those boxes, it's kind of like pre-COVID social distancing. It's kind of what a lot of concerts look like now. But when you have those boxes, you don't have that density up front that

you have at another show. There's not like, you know, the hardcore fans riding the rail kind of vibe. So, I think that can be disorienting the first couple of times. But this time I went and I said, you know what, I've sat in these boxes before and I've probably been a little laid back, but I kind of understood the layout better. So, there's a couple of times during the show that I would say like, how's everybody in the back doing? And you would hear this distant roar as if there's like a concert going on, like on the other side of the hill. And so, you know, I just,

I think I could take everything a little more in stride then and realize, you know, at the Hollywood Bowl, like you can't, the energy is not going to hit you the same way, but like, don't, don't get it twisted. It's like people, people are having a good time. It's so fun when you're in those boxes and you're drinking wine and you're ordering food. It's such a pleasant experience.

But yeah, for the performer, the energy must be different. I almost enjoy watching a band more there, although I guess we're not giving it back to you guys as much as we could have. No, yeah, but now I how how pleasant it can be also i was i was booing the entire time and i was doing my thumbs down i don't know whether you caught that but yeah i didn't i didn't appreciate that um but it is crazy the hollywood bowl is 18 000 people yeah that's roughly the same actually that's more people than you would get at a standard arena show yeah because you most of the times you know they cut off the the back

so like at state at staples center yeah for instance they cut off a third of the crowd or whatever so that because it's not in the round exactly like like if fish played at the staples center they'd probably do some cool 360 thing but the average show at Staples Center is definitely less people than the Hollywood Bowl. So you have to imagine all those people being just kind of shot up in, you know, up and up and up the way the Hollywood Bowl goes. But, you know, that's the price you pay for being like in the middle of a big city under

the sky. It was a beautiful night. Was it in, I feel like it was in October or something, but it just felt. I think it was. It was something, but it just felt. I think it was. It was so, the weather was amazing. Cool, but not freezing. There were so many great people there. I mentioned Chaim, your wife.

Also, Ezra, that version of Sunflower you guys do, it has a different name in concert, or the fans have kind of given it a new name. Is that right? Oh, yeah. That's some good research. I, we, well, we call it Stoneflower. Stoneflower. That's right. I think, and, and over, I hope, you know, our plan was always to develop many versions of it, but yeah,

it's such a short song. We knew we had to do something different live. So I remember we were, we would jam on it in the rehearsal, and we'd do kind of more of like a light, kind of Grateful Dead version. And then at some point, somebody suggested, what if we did kind of like a stoner metal version, and we go into basically like a full Black Sabbath vibe? And so we always called it Stoneflower. Any plans to release that, what's the word i'm looking for publicly

professionally uh officially yes we're definitely been talking about doing releasing more live stuff there's a uh we played it on austin city limits that show so there was like a probably a video floating around um yeah i'm sure in the future that we'll be putting up many versions of it. Very nice. Well, enough about Vampire Weekend until, of course, Adam and I do a show just based on your output. Would that be flattering to you?

Do you think the talking heads should be flattered by this show that we're doing, or should they be mad? No, well, I will say George Harrison was on the show just a few episodes back. So, I mean, this dude's like a legend. He's in The Beatles. He's in Talking Heads.

He's in The Modern Lovers and then Traveling Wilburys. And he produced the live. Live, of course. Yeah. Did he do Candlebox? No, he didn't do Candlebox. Violent Femmes. Like, he has such an amazing career.

And he was on this show and he seemed very flattered by it. Oh, totally. He seemed very flattered by it. Oh, yeah. No, I think they should be. And I also think that, I mean, I'm sure you guys have talked about this, but I do. Yes, I would be honored if one day, maybe in 10 to 15 years, you make it to the Vampire Weekend catalog. That could be a good tradeoff for having you guys sing on the record.

Okay, yeah. We promise. Just give me a promise. That could be a good trade-off for having you guys sing on the record. Okay, yeah. We promise. Just give me a promise. That's set in stone at this point. 10 to 15 years. Sure, we can handle that. Because all those bands are different, but it is... Yeah, I think you guys so far, you've picked bands who have a...

Not just some cool music, but who have like a worthy career to talk about. I think it's high praise. Well, you guys need to put out more records is what I have to say. You know, I mean, a lot of these bands that we've covered were on the one album a year cycle early in their career. And, you know, I'd like to see Vampire Weekend get into that cycle.

Well, Talking Heads, how many studio albums total? Is it eight? Not that many. What is it? Total, they did five, six, seven albums total? Not that many. What is it like? Total, they did five, six, seven, eight. They did eight. That's a lot. But they were doing one a year for their first, for a while.

So 77, they did one, 78, 79, 80, and then they took a couple years off, put out their live record, and then 83, they did speaking in tongues uh and then late 83 or 84 they did stop making sense and then 85 little creatures 86 true stories i mean they were really on the grind of like it's really prolific and chris farts talks about how he was always the one to say like to everybody hey guys you know we got to put out our record this year uh and that was just kind of accepted that's what bands did and so he was always the one to say to everybody, hey guys, we got to put out our record this year. And that was just kind of accepted.

That's what bands did. And so he was always the one to rally the troops and get everyone into the studio. I can't even fathom how people used to do that. But I think we could get to eight within the next decade. Yeah, no one really does that anymore. No one is on that cycle anymore. Well, wait, eight within the next decade, that's

one every two and a half years or so? That would be amazing. I'm going to hold you to that. We're singing on your record. You're putting out eight records. Look, I got to say, the people who have come on this show and promised us things, good old Mike Miller, Mike

Myers, he said he was coming out with a solo album where is it you know what i mean yeah no he said he would have a solo album by the end of last year by the end of last year uh i think it's with that uh with that covid vaccine that uh they promised us sheesh um all right well let's let's uh uh return to True Stories and let's go through some of the music. One thing I wanted to mention, this is ostensibly the soundtrack to the movie True Stories. And originally, Mr. Burns wanted to put out a true soundtrack where it was the actors in the film singing the songs. singing the songs and somehow he was convinced that would not be popular which i kind of agree and was convinced that it should be talking heads doing their versions of the songs from the film and that would be a more commercial enterprise um which uh i think i mean i i think i agree that people were more excited by a new talking headsads record than a bunch of actors, than John Goodman singing.

Would you have bought that record, Adam, if it had come out? The actor version? Yeah. Instead of this version. Probably not. Yeah, probably not. So I think it was a good idea, although Mr. Burns apparently after they put it out it wasn't the hit that he was looking for

kind of said that kind of implied that the band talked him into it and he it ended up being a bad idea, but I don't know. Let's hear some of the songs. This is how it starts. This is Love for Sale and this is

that nice drum song that we were talking about. Here we go. This is Love for Sale, and this is that nice drum song that we were talking about. Here we go. This is Love for Sale. One, two. One, two, three. I was born in a house with a television on its home Guess I grew up too fast And I forgot my name We're being citizenized

And we ain't got time on our hands Suddenly we're driving to us And it's the real thing And you're rolling In the window With me And I can love you Like a color

TV And I've got to say Come on and try I've got the love for sale Got the love for sale And the love is here Come on and try All right. This is traditionally where we say what we think about the song. And Ezra, as you are our guest, I'm giving you the high compliment to offer your opinion first.

Oh, thank you. Well, to be honest, I expected a little more than just a cursory thank you. I expected a little more gratitude. So if you can amp it up a little bit on a scale from Haim to your wife, I expected more towards your wife. up a little bit on a scale from heim to your wife i expected more towards your wife i'm honored to be able to kick off my constructive criticism oh constructive criticism no i like this true stories no i mean i think it's not my favorite song on the record but i i think i was thinking when i was getting ready and listening to this again, I think it's interesting. On the one hand, I do think there's a bit of a horseshoe thing happening

in Talking Heads' career where if you look past the 80s production, there's a songwriting vibe here that's kind of going back to the first two albums. It's got a 77 vibe. You could totally picture a version of this on on the first record the they had they had uh stopped by uh for these two records little creatures and true stories they had stopped their process of uh finding grooves uh first and then mr burns writing lyrics afterwards and they'd gone back to Mr. Burns, right.

Totally doing songwriting before they went into the studio. Okay. So yeah, maybe that's part of it. I think it's also like at this point, I like the simplicity of, of this record and, and I can see why it might've been, well, obviously it has to do with the movie but I see why the kind of weird American tone

of the movie and of the songs probably was appealing after some of their other explorations but I think that my constructive criticism would just be that I think part of why this album is not one that people get into the talking heads now or like talking about too much

is because just at this point in 1986, there's like a lot of music. Music had kind of caught up to the talking heads a little bit. So there's, you know, you hear this and you like hear, sounds a little bit like the cars or even like a touch of like, I don't know, like Dire Straits or something. It's a good song. It just, it's not like it's uniquely Talking Heads. It also has no weird old sourpuss Brian Eno

like sounds on it. It's just clean production. It's just like, it sounds almost like, almost like there's no one else playing other than the four people which i don't know that we were expecting that after coming off of stop making sense which had this incredible you know 10-piece band with backing singers and um little creatures even which sound which had a lot of instrumentation and overdubs and stuff this just sounds so sparse yeah there's something like really straightforward about it where there's nothing hidden it's just all out there for for you to hear so there's no real like mystery to it

yeah which which in the case of wild wildlife i think totally works there's something about that being like a late Talking Heads hit that is kind of just like simple, but there's like enough weirdness in the delivery. So this, you know, that's a good song too. It's just not quite Wild Wild Life level. Right. Yeah. I remember putting on this record.

I bought this record at the record store that popped up across the street from my house, which was such a godsend to me at the time because otherwise i had to go to the tower records uh on beach boulevard um which was about three miles away from my house so there was a record store popped up right across the street from my house and uh this i think it was open this year and i remember buying it really excited and putting that on and kind of going like huh huh, okay. It's very thin. That first song in particular.

Just kind of like, it's very thin. There's nothing really, it's a good song. I like the melody. I like his singing on it, but there's not a lot behind it. There's not a lot going on in it, but I like it. Yeah, me too. Yeah, I think the production is such a huge part of it. It's like the, that's just how a lot of music sounded at the time.

Right. So maybe they were just getting... Like, the songwriting is strong. The playing, obviously, the drums, very strong. Just maybe they didn't have time to push the envelope with the production as they had in the past. I do sometimes, when I listen to this record, think that it is them doing two records back to back.

And this was sort of the afterthought record in a way. Was, did they produce this themselves? I think so. I was just trying to look at that and I believe they produced it themselves. You, one, one interesting story about these records, Eric Thorngren, who they, George Harrison, when he was on the show a few episodes back, he mentioned E.T., his friend E.T., and we thought that he was talking about the space alien the entire time. And we were like, this dude's fucking hallucinating. He thinks he's hanging

out with E.T. It was weird. But apparently he was talking about Eric Thorngren. I was reading Chris Fartz's book, and how they met him is really interesting where chris farts was in uh in nassau and uh you know because he has a place there and he looked out his window and saw some guy like passed out on the grass out in front and he's like hey dude you all right and the guy goes oh yeah i've been remixing a bob marley song buffalo soldier and i got really tired and I just passed out here. And so they go, oh, can we hear it? And so Chris Farts and Robert Palmer go to the studio and hear this remix of Buffalo Soldier that he's working on,

and it's incredible. And so Chris Farts is like, dude, you've got to do the Talking Heads records. So he did Stop Making Sense. He did Little Creatures. And he did this one. By the way, that version of Buffalo Soldier that he's talking about was the version on Legend when I was in junior high school. But it's no longer on anything. You can't find it anywhere.

Well, I have it in my collection because I don't just listen to streaming, Adam. But you mean that sped up poppy version of it? of it yeah i think so i'm sure i have it somewhere um okay so let's go to this is track two this is puzzling evidence this feels like they're trying to rewrite uh uh life during wartime again they. They've done it like three times. That like big echoey room 80s sound where do you where do you fall on echo ezra well like a lot of reverb it really depends it it's it's about the song and the moment sometimes

it's great like on early smith's records it's so good and then when the smith started recording everything cleanly it was not as good in my opinion but uh so sometimes it's great but you guys don't use a lot of it right well i mean we're definitely always using reverb uh and yeah but i mean echo specifically here and there i think i think subtly. I think there is a type, sometimes people can hide behind it, like if you're not confident in the vocal, for instance. It's a very easy way to make everything vibey,

but I think a lot of times the best music has a middle ground. And I can see why the way this song sounds, like in the 80 this this way of recording must have sounded so big so new um like yeah it's a that's big snare drum like that so like in your face but again like the it's it's just not as uniquely talking heads all right all right let's hear a little more of this song oh we're back to the instrumental part. We talked completely over the chorus. This is the, on the chorus, we have the Burt Cross Choir singing backgrounds, which I think is a,

kind of makes this song stand out a little more than if it was just... You know, one question I have for you guys, maybe, I don't know if you know because i was just thinking like this sounds like the exact type of song that like you know you hear the studio version like okay but i bet it could really go off live and then i was like thinking were they touring in this era like what was no see you know i was listening to this record today going man i wish i could hear a live version of this. They never did another tour after Stop Making Sense.

Whoa, oh, that was the last one. And during the making of this record, they were asked to be on Live Aid. And George Harrison was talking about it on this very program. Mr. Burns turned it down because he was too busy working on his movie. And the whole band thought that was such a missed opportunity

that they would have become like U2 level, Peter Gabriel level, live touring act if they had done that. And they never toured again. So a lot of these songs, I feel like, man, they would just open up so amazingly if you could hear the entire, like, 10-piece Stop Making Sense tour version. Yeah.

Oh, totally. I feel like this song is, like, right now it sounds, like, so of its time, like, with the choir and everything. But I think a lot of it he also kind of started like the choir in the chorus became like a cliche within like three years but I don't remember a lot of new wave music using choirs like this at the time it was pretty new from what I can recall I mean you had Peter Gabriel had peter gabriel uh i i it's very weird saying peter gabriel to you ezra by the way because i've heard you say it so many times um oh yeah but uh uh peter gabriel or uh you know simple minds you know like doing some or no who am i uh paul simon that's what i'm thinking of they were they were

doing a lot of like sort of influence stuff like this graceland came out the same year as as this yeah all right that's puzzling evidence ezra i'm gonna go to you again what do you think it's good i actually kind of i'm like a little more into this song than love for sale but because i yeah this one you can hear yeah also that that long-term talking heads like kind of interest in like yeah roots music or gospel like even like you know the fact that they covered take me to the river there's always been that kind of connection so it makes sense one thing i think and i thought this when i was listening to the record before when you listen to the first two tracks,

this record more than any Talking Heads record makes me think of the B-52s. Who always work, I don't know how often they've come up in your guys' conversations, but the B-52s always struck me as kind of like a, I don't know, like a bizarro version version of talking heads like I think Fred Schneider and David Byrne have something in common but David Byrne is the slightly more like accessible serious downtown New York well I don't know about accessible but in some ways but he's like the downtown New York dude yeah so I think everything he's doing is through the lens of like serious New York art whereas Fred Schneider is everything he's doing is through the lens of like serious New York art,

whereas Fred Schneider... Is through camp, Southern camp in a way. Yeah. And he's actually, then I was looking him up, he actually grew up in New Jersey, but he ended up in Athens, Georgia. And yeah, he's got this Southern kitschy fun thing, which again, they're like not a million miles away from each other. And then I guess, David Byr burn once started producing a b-52s album and it fell through yeah well no he he did do an ep uh there's actually some uh friction apparently between the band reading chris farts's book uh because chris

chris farts feels like he was an early champion of the b-52s and and helped them out in their career. And then they asked Mr. Burns to produce. And Mr. Burns produced the Mesopotamia EP, which really takes everything special about the B-52s and strips it out. And it's not my favorite. I don't know if you know that EP, Ezra, but it's kind of the first misstep of the B-52s career, I think. Wait, but so chris yes you can't say it i understand but the drummer from talking heads who recently wrote a tell-all salacious memoir he he felt he felt like he personally had championed

the b-52s and then they went to they went to Mr. Burns rather than him yes oh he felt hurt like like I think so yeah because he he produced you know he and Tina produced a lot of records and they did great some great records yeah they did great records and he was kind of like it's too you know I don't know why they went with with I I'm paraphrasing obviously and maybe putting too too much of my own feeling about it. But that's what it seemed like reading the book is that he was a little miffed that Mr. Burns got to produce that record and then it came out and was not a big hit or anything. I see. But interesting, yeah, about the b-52s there's a funny connection between between those bands and also when you hear these songs doesn't it kind of feel like as different as those bands are you suddenly

start to be like on the trajectory that you could kind of see off of true stories you're like if the if talking and stay together would it have been that crazy if in 1989 they dropped love shack well yeah i honestly like listening to this you can kind of hear like posland evidence you know i mean it's and and you know within just a couple of years kate pearson is working with rem and uh yeah so i can i can see mr burns doing love shack i think that would be a good cover for him yeah i mean clearly more of a b-52 song but like yeah not a million miles away yeah no i think that's a a good uh a good uh theory adam what do you think of this song it's almost like a pastiche of of the but someone learned a new word um almost it's almost like a pastiche but but it also, at the time, it was like a cool new mixing of sounds and a cool new sound for them, too.

Because this is, it is kind of taking that little creatures thing and injecting it with something else. I think it's good, but it's not like, I guess it doesn't feel enough like talking heads or feels like they're going too outside the lines it doesn't really feel like them but when i when i listened to it i i was kind of like oh they're really going for mainstream singles um these first two songs these first two songs to me were like are obvious and you know not a lot challenging about them and and and hooky in a way that it was like oh they're really is this even more so than little creatures i think which has just beautiful songs but they're recorded a little more challengingly this just feels to me the first time i heard this i was like oh it's really loud and obvious but i don't know that i

like either of those songs as much as any other talking head song i've ever heard you know right i think the album gets more challenging now as it progresses and gets a little more but just those two just seem very like hey hey hey you know sort of like fred schneider hey we're the singles hey let's hear track three this is hey now by a band called talking heads i put this on so many mixtapes back then for uh girls you were wanting to date or i don't want to get personal. You've never gotten personal on this show. Man, I would love to hear the American Utopia band do this yeah totally oh yeah are there any uh true stories songs in american utopia no he does do uh blind from naked that's

the one like that's like the late song yeah i mean he does road to nowhere yeah but um blind really felt like the kind of outlier like whoa i didn't expect that i like this feels a little more classic talkingads to me for some reason. Yeah, this also takes me back to Talking Heads 77 a little. There's elements of it there. Mm-hmm. This could be straight out of a Vampire Weekend song, couldn't it? Sort of this feel? Oh, totally. That guitar part?

Yeah. Is that the part you would play or one of your sidekicks? That sounds like the kind of simplified part that I would play. Also, just to clarify what we were talking about before, as you guys said, we have an incredible guitarist who's been touring part of our lives. Yeah, what's his name? Brian Jones.

Brian Jones. Brian Jones. I want to give Brian a specific, because he's an absolute shredder. Yeah, he was amazing. He was incredible. And he seemed like he was having so much fun playing, which, you know, honestly, watching your last Hollywood Bowl show kind of reminded me of like,

Stop Making Sense of how the band there, of musicians that were playing those songs, like escalated it and took it to another level, like a joyous, rapturous level of like, it was a celebration. And that's how that show felt like to me. Just everyone was having such a good time. I think that once you get past the typical four or five people in a band and you get into like we have seven on stage, and yeah, that has the potential to just like feel and sound so different.

Just that number of people, it's more like a party. I think you should add a DJ like Incubus. I mean, I know some good DJs Just a guy scratching Or just like a hype man Just a guy to jump around on stage Maybe the dude from the Mighty Mighty Boss Tones And I love Mighty Mighty Boss

I'm a huge ska fan Yeah What's your What wave? Third wave? Fourth wave? Truly all of it I mean mean, I, you know, because of my age, I got in via third wave, but then also second and first. And I used to always say that Vampire Weekend was fourth wave ska.

Oh, really? I can see that. We didn't really create a wave. We have one legitimate ska punk song, Holiday on our second album. This is a Scott song. Yeah. You had the Dance Craze soundtrack. I was so into that. That's second wave.

Oh, yeah, yeah. That's second wave? Yeah, I got in second wave. Specials. Yeah, specials. What's first wave? First wave is like all the legitimate Jamaican Scott stuff from the 60s, 70s.

That makes sense. And that stuff sounds so good now. It's like recorded not very cleanly and it all, it just sounds, I love it. I have a bunch of compilations of like old 60s ska stuff that's just like, I put it on whenever I want to just like feel good, which is never, by the way, because I hate myself once in a blue moon yeah no all that all that stuff is amazing and obviously directly flowed into reggae um you like bob marley all those guys they were in essentially ska rocksteady bands

before um let's go to uh this is Wildlife. This was the big single. On the Wikipedia, it doesn't say whether this- No, there's Papa Legba first. Oh, sorry. I totally forgot about Papa Legba. I love this song. Let's go to Papa Legba. You hear that? That's spooky.

Someone banging on a glass. This reminds me of mid-80s Oingo Boingo, this keyboard part. Yes. It reminds me of the Midnight Run soundtrack. It's such a familiar keyboard sound that I i was like i meant to look at i was like i'm sure it's like something that everybody was using then can you look up keyboard sounds on online oh yeah because like if you go you know uh on some message board or something you'll have people being like oh what do you think it is on this song?

And somebody might be like, I know they talked about it in the documentary or other people might fight it. But yeah, often you'll find a community of people debating what sound everything was. Do you have to, when you record an album, do you have to write down every pedal setting and everything that you did when you recorded the album so you can replicate it live does that make sense i think that that's what

people would do if they're really being organized and i think back in the day that was that kind of was the job of a studio assistant and then of course like you know nowadays you can use such sophisticated plugins like in the box that it would always be in the session. Like record it. But you're right. If you say you bust out the pedal board and you record something in and you didn't take a picture or write it down, that could be like the bane of your existence if you decide you need to go back. You can almost get lazier now because so many settings are saved in Pro Tools that anything in the real world

on an actual pedal it'd be so easy to forget. Interesting. This sounds like the next album to me. Yeah, I mean it definitely is a little more in the salsa rhythms.

David Byrne's solo vibe. Yeah, right. This is probably more what people were expecting on this record, I bet. Yeah, I don't know. When I heard it, I was definitely like, oh, this isn't a single, but it's always stuck with me. I really like this song. a single but it's it's always stuck with me i really like this song to me it sounds like naked in the sense that parts of naked sound sound to me like they were out of ideas

um ezra what do you think about papa legba it's solid it's got it's got a title that i i would expect to see on one of your records yeah i'm wondering is papa legba like a person well yeah i mean uh pops staples sings it in the movie so you got papa and pops i really don't know yeah no this i mean this is like this reminds me more of of uh kind of like speaking in tongues kind of cool weird synth sounds this also feels like a lot more oh the first three are like kind of intense yeah this has like weird open more minimalist vibe it definitely is the last track on side one you know what I mean like where they're like right all right we've we've hooked you and

now let's give you something a little weirder all right that's papa legba uh and now this is the first track on side two this was the big single that i was itching to get to earlier. This is Wild Wild Life by a band called Talking Heads. This part sounds different than anything they've done, which I like. Like, it sounds unique. Does that make sense? What I always think of this part

is shattered by the Rolling Stones. Oh, yeah, yeah. Which is a different vibe for them. Totally. Yeah. I can't hear you Here on this mountaintop Oh, oh, oh I got some wild, wild ice I got some news to tell Oh, oh, oh

About some wild, wild ice Here come the doctor and judge Oh, oh, oh She's got some wild, wild ice And I know you like it Oh, oh, oh There's some wild, wild lust. And I'm the way I like it. Oh, oh. There's a wild, wild lust. Finally some shredding.

Mm-hmm. Just a good vibe. Yeah. Yeah. They get into some good shredding a little later. Let me try to find the guitar solo part here. I feel like this is perfect. Yeah, it's like, this is, obviously,

they're very far away from Remain in Light, like six-minute crazy song, but this is simple. But yeah, this is like a perfect late 1986 simple talking head song here it comes oh yeah i love this so good is that george harrison i think it probably is i mean when you got a beetle when you got a beetle on on the band, you let him shred. Ezra, what do you think? Yeah, just a great song.

And I was also thinking, like you guys were saying before, you know, this maybe like the sales falling off a bit from uh little creatures the last one but i've always thought like the when you look after the fact that like a band's whole discography if you can say like on one of the weaker albums it still like produces something like this just like a great single like this you're like yeah that's why the talking heads rule like on later periods stones records you know where where maybe the wheels are coming off still they would have Yeah, that's why the talking heads rule. Like on later periods, Stones records, you know, where maybe the wheels are coming off. Still, they would have like one or two classics. The steel wheels are coming off?

Yeah. Adam, this is why you're my sidekick on this show. I love this end part, by the way. I want to hear a little bit of it because I wanted to mention one thing. Wow, wow, wow, wow. I love that tape speeding up effect. Yeah, that's cool.

It's so good. And then my friend who I've mentioned on this show before, San Luis Obispo music legend casey bowman from rhythm akimbo he put out a uh a solo single at one point and i was listening to it and this came out uh let's see this came out in uh 2010 i was listening to it he did he did my friend doug' song. He did a cover of it. And at the end, I was like, what is that from? Let me just play a little bit of this.

I was like, that sounds familiar. Okay, so he did this whole song. And then at the end, he replicated the entire. That's cool. And I was like, what is that from what is that from and then suddenly it just hit me like a thunderbolt like oh he he totally replicated wild wildlife um okay so we have a few are you a big fan of that song i definitely like it if if we're talking about the pantheon of talking head songs it's if we're talking about from

haim to rashida it's probably it's probably in the middle for me like it's for me it's it's not one of my favorites uh but it was a good single i i went and came out because it was such a big hit that you got sick of it 30 years ago or whatever no i just i think it was my feeling with this whole record i was you couldn't be more amped for a talking heads record than me i mean um you know uh ezra we were talking about how they they never toured again after stop making sense like growing up here in la i would read the la times the calendar section and in the back uh of the sunday version they had all of the ticket scalper or the ticket brokers would would have ads where you could they were saying like put your

deposit down for tickets for talking heads and i was always like there's one band i want to see it's talking heads i was like considering putting a deposit down with the ticket broker to see them and they never they never toured again and and so you couldn't be more amped for a record than i was and i remember just being after being like just a little disappointed a little disappointed yeah see you know what's you know what's weird is that in in that situation which i've been with bands a lot over the years it takes me years to actually get disappointed because when i'm that excited for an for an album no matter what it is i love it and think it's great yeah it's the it's the phantom menace phantom menace yeah yeah exactly i mean we've talked about ezra you uh a big uh star wars

fan i'm not a big star wars person what what do you like? Logan's Run? I mean, what's an artistic guy like you? Well, when there was a time, I no longer feel this way, but when I first saw the, as far as sci-fi goes, the fifth element in 1997 when I was 13, for at least two years after that, I said, that's my favorite movie of all time. Yeah. I remember seeing it and I was, I think, 26 and coming out of the theater going, I will never watch that again.

I remember coming out of the theater and being like, I'm way too stoned still. Yeah. And you still feel that way. I do. Let's go to track six. There's some cool stuff in that movie. Track six of nine. Awesome stuff. I remember it just not making sense and all. And speaking go to track six. There's some cool stuff in that movie. Track six of nine. Awesome stuff.

I remember it just not making sense and all. And speaking of stop making sense. And I remember we would always make fun of it by talking about how the fifth element was love. Which was like sort of the moral of it at the end. Yeah, that's. Like doesn't she. She's like a robot or an alien or something like that. Mia Jovovich.

And she like looks through the entire catalog of human history. I feel like this was one of the first times I saw this cliche, and she's watching old newsreels about everything, and then she gets to Hitler and starts crying. Oh, yeah. Yes. There's a few corny parts. Overall, though, it's like the design, the clothes.

Chris Tucker's hairstyle. Ohris tucker just kills it and then bruce willis just being cranky cranky old bruce willis that's like good role for him yeah great cast great cast um that's what i said after i broke my leg uh to the doctor um let's hear radiohead this is a song called uh not the band radiohead but a song called radio head this is a song called uh not the band radio head but a song called radio head this is track six on true stories by the band talking heads which is where radio had got their name right it certainly is good eye i think this is my favorite song this sounds kind of classic i love this is a cool song although it sounds nothing like the band Radiohead. At all.

Never once did they sound like this. What if their next record was exactly like this? Would you like it? I would. I could see it in a weird way. I just don't know how Tom York's voice would sound singing on this kind of thing. You know, there are some singers who can sing anything, any style of music, and it sounds good.

I don't know. Tom York needs that sort of icy, cold indifference, doesn't he? I can't think of anything too close. One thing I can think of, like back in the Napster days, I had an MP3 of Radiohead covering an Elvis Costello song called I'll Wear It Proudly. Oh, yeah. I think they played that like four or five. From Spike, I think, right? Yeah, late 80s.

And they, you know, it's really not a Tom York type song, but. It's more of a folky kind of like acoustic-y Irish song in a way. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely got some of that. And I just always thought he sounded great singing it. And I was like, oh, maybe that's definitely not the direction they've gone in over the past 20 years. But who knows? I had in those early Napster days, I had them singing Nobody Does It Better, the James Bond theme.

Oh, yeah. That sounds awesome. What if Radiohead just turned into a covers band? Well, I think they used to do more covers, and then they just wrote a bunch of awesome songs, and we're like, I guess we don't need to do this anymore. Like a cover bar band. They would cover just Journey and the Eagles.

That would be awesome. I mean, Pearl Jam kind of does that live. Yeah, true. Yeah, they do a lot of like split end songs and all sorts of stuff. Pearl Jam will easily drop seven covers in a set. Let's see. I would love to see Pearl Jam again. Me too. Like it wouldn't be, we were supposed to go see them and then kovat happens and oh god they had that real talking headsy single on their

new album so good song let's hear uh radio heads nobody does it better to hear what i'm talking about what james bond movie is this uh the spy who loved me. Right, because she just randomly says The Spy Who Loved Me in the song. Oh, right. There have been so many good James Bond songs. It's crazy. Yeah, it's insane. What do you think of the new Billie Eilish? Oh, she did a james bond song yeah isn't it crazy that that she released her james bond theme and then the the movie was supposed to come out in two months that's that was like the lead time

of like two months before the movie comes out i I'm going to drop the single. She drops it, and then COVID, boom, immediately happens, and James Bond gets delayed forever. And then finally James Bond is going to come out this Thanksgiving, and so she drops the video, and then literally two days later they delay it again. It's like the worst timing for her. I mean, that's got to be like a musician's nightmare. Wait, did Radiohead do a James Bond song?

They wrote one for Spectre, and it was not used. Oh, right, yeah, because they have a song called Spectre. Yeah, it's a bonus track. Let's hear a little bit of that. Why'd you have to be so good? Yeah, that's always interesting when hugely famous bands on spec essentially like write these songs for james bond and then they don't get used it's so crazy to me this is specter what is it like

oh i was just gonna say because you can't and and also, maybe because of loving the Carly Simon song, you can't imagine that Radiohead would even do it, because you can't imagine, obviously there's a lot of musicians, if somebody says, like, hey, guys, we need a song for, like, whatever. Well, you and Step Brothers. Oh, yeah, but we didn't write that for Step Brothers. Although that would be an amazing story if we did.

But wait, we've written well, we kind of For Nick and Nora's? Yes, yeah, Ottoman, which is a song I wrote the guitar riff for that actually when I was in high school so I was always kind of sitting on it. For the listener, by the way, Ezra is miming playing the guitar.

Oh yeah, I wrote uh i like that song a lot we've yeah yeah i think that thank you that's a that's a slept on song of ours yeah i love that one so is that sort of put together specifically for the movie then well i had this riff old riff and then yeah it kind of came together so we finished it for the movie and then i think we oh i i wrote a song for the peter rabbit movie whoa i guess those are the two experiences i don't think i've heard that one oh thank you well are you saying thank you to me i I said I haven't heard it. Oh, no. Well, I'm saying thank you to both of you. Well, I appreciate it.

You, Scott, for your honesty. And Adam, for your... I like the way you operate. Now, I kind of see why they didn't use this. It's like not exactly... It's dramatic, but it's not very hooky. But I'm just saying, like, you can imagine that you get these, as a musician, you get these giant cattle calls all the time for stuff where they're like, oh, this, you know,

Rio 5 wants a song. Like, do you want to throw something out there? And, you know, it depends on how badly you need money or if you uh if if you like have any connection anybody working on the movie but you can imagine radiohead they might nine times out of ten something would be like radiohead are you interested in writing the theme for a movie they'd probably say fuck off they must actually have an some sort of an affinity yeah that's how i feel i mean tom york did did write a song for the Twilight movie. But this, essentially, he put the spec in Spectre and just...

We did a Twilight song, too. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think you might be on the same record. Let's look that up. Oh, I'm surprised Tom York did it. Okay, let's look up the Twilight albums that I have here. There's Terror Twilight by Pavement. Okay, so there's...

Which one are you on? Are you on Eclipse or are you on New Moon? I think Eclipse. Okay, so you're on Eclipse. And... No, Tommy Ork is not on that. He is on New Moon. And where exactly is he? He is... New Moon. And where exactly is he?

He is... What Vampire Weekend song is on the Twilight movies? Hearing Damage is the one that Tom York did. Oh. Our song is called Jonathan Lowe. Oh, yeah. And that one also has its roots in a song I started in high school. This is a little bit of Jonathan Lowe.

This is actually our most U2 song. Oh, yeah. I think I got this as a B-side. Like, later on. Yeah, we actually put it up ourselves on the streaming services for a long time. It wasn't available. We're just like... Yeah, I see the youtube is yeah we could have some fun like i don't know if this would have fit on any of our albums i like it this is this is a fun one to play live every now and then yeah i

bet i'm surprised tom tom york did the did the twilight soundtrack i wonder what was going through his head yeah i don't know i mean you know i was i was talking to matthew sweet when we went to see the movie bucky larson together um and uh i i love that by the way matthew sweet i i grew up a huge matthew sweet fan i mean the the album girlfriend i listened to over and over and played and played uh when i was breaking up with a girlfriend used to play uh uh, on my guitar, I used to play, you don't love me over and over again to where my roommates were like, shut the fuck up. So, uh, I had Matthew sweet on, on my podcast, the, uh, uh, infinitely more successful comedy bang, bang podcast.

And, uh, after, after afterwards, he was like, Hey, do you want to go see a movie? You want to go see Bucky Larson? And I was like, hell yeah, I do. So we went to... What is Bucky Larson? What is that one? It's my friend Nick Swartzen's starring turn as... Like Bucky Larson's former child star or something?

Oh, right. Something like that, yeah. It's a Happy Gilmore production? Yes, yes. So we went to see that together and's a happy gilmore production yes yes so we went to see we went to see that together um and had a good time but i remember him telling me that back in the 90s being on a soundtrack like was such an influx of cash and it had all dried up essentially by uh the end of the napster era like like he he I used to collect his soundtracks, like the flipper soundtrack or the Ace Ventura 2 soundtrack, just cause he would have a song on it. And that, that apparently was

like a good source of income for musicians. Oh, I bet. Well, yeah. Also just pre-streaming, even if you had one song on and out, like, like people, uh, I always heard the story that, uh, what's his name? Um, Nick Lowe, who wrote What's So Funny About Peaceful Understandings. Yeah, he essentially, I asked him about this on my show. He was able to finance a whole tour just from being on the Bodyguard soundtrack. Yeah, that must have been huge for him. This is not a soundtrack, but I've often thought about this too, is that David Byrne co-wrote and sings on one song on the big Selena album,

which is so random. But you imagine that when, yeah, when Selena did her big English language album, the big hit was I'll Be Dreaming of You Tonight or whatever, Thinking of You Tonight. You know, when tomorrow I'll be holding you tight. It was like a big ballad. So that's a massive hit. And then of course, with her tragic death, that's her, was her latest album. It's huge. And then some A&R person was like, hey, David Byrne, like you're

interested in like Texas and like world music and shit. And so there's like a duet between David Byrne and Selena on that same album. so i always think like that album probably sold like 15 million copies or something like yeah david david burn probably was like oh all right you know because because on an old album like that a traditional album it doesn't matter if you wrote the hit right or the uh the weird david burn album track there are peers of yours i think who like essentially wrote a hook on a beyonce record or something and and that has to be a hugely uh i mean yeah you did right yeah so that's like bucco delores like how many bozos did you get for that well in that case the the song ended up having a million uh writers and and a lot of what i wrote was quoting yeah yeah yeah so i think i

so i gave them a nice present how many bozos i'm a producer on it how many bozos i missed the beginning how many bozos what's the exchange current exchange rate yeah with the current with the current exchange rate yeah how much how many bozos did you get from that okay i'm checking online um it's like a 97 000 bozos 97 000 bozos that's 970 000 dollars that's amazing oh no i maybe i got the math wrong oh maybe you did um i feel like we have to get back to talking heads don't we yeah there's just two more songs i think uh there are three but uh this one is called dream operator by talking heads this is an unusual one oh yeah it's like long instrumental beginning and a waltz yeah i was like i was saying like what does this sound like? Not talk, doesn't sound...

Nightmare Before Christmas? A little bit. Taking their time. That rootsy, bendy guitar playing. Dire Straits. Yeah. This whole album made me think of Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits album. Yeah, interesting. Because it is like, a lot of these songs,

I do think this is a cool album but it i can't help but compare some of the the highlights to uh like dire straits walk of life which is a high bar for just like a cool 80s rootsy kind of jam totally dire straits and like that, that Dire Straits traveling Wilburys, it all seems like very much, uh, sort of in the vein of, of there's a certain like revival of those types of sounds going on now with, um,

God, like war on drugs and stuff. War on drugs. Yeah. Essentially like that late eighties, eighties roots. Yeah. Revival with, yeah yeah the 80s roots revival

but yeah there's a lot of cool stuff in that music uh what do we think about dream operator i like this song it is really pretty it's the one I always forget about. Like I can never hum it or when I look at the title, I kind of go, what is this one? But, but it's also a little more challenging and I guess technically beautiful than

the other stuff on, than some of the other stuff on the record. I also think that if he were to put this in American Utopia, it would kill. It's like a really nice lyric and a hopeful, optimistic song, and hearing it with that band would be cool. I really feel like talking about this and thinking about it, if Talking Heads had stayed together and they kept making albums past Naked, I think eventually in the 90s they probably would have made another

kind of late masterpiece type vibe-y album. And if they had toured that whole time, who knows? Maybe they could have been playing. Fish always plays Talking Heads songs. They could have been playing shows with Fish. They could have been a huge live. No, I mean, there's definitely an alternate universe where the songs that mr burns wrote for his solo records become talking heads records and you know a lot of his solo records are kind of dodgy they they maybe would have been improved by uh having

talking heads play on them i don't know there was something that happened between writing the song and bringing it to the band because the songwriting was i mean there are great david byrne songs but yeah it's not as consistent certainly not as consistent i think consistency is yeah really the the story of most of his i like that one um all right let's go to track eight this is people Like Us I think this is a really good one just to give you a preview but this is People Like Us by Talking Hits I forgot about this too

yeah I like the pedal still this is cool I think this has a great chorus and a great verse melody which to me add those two together and you have I think this has a great chorus and a great verse melody, which, to me, add those two together and you have a great song. I'm no musician, but... Was David Byrne actually born in 1950?

I was wondering that or whether he's doing it in character when I heard it earlier today. Thank you for asking that. Okay. No, he's born in 1952. So he's in character doing this, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Growing big as a house. People like us.

Gonna make it because we don't want freedom. We don't want justice. We just want someone to love. So, really cool. The only... It's just so straightforward, much like all of this record, you know? There's definitely the pedal steel is the one thing happening on it

that's, like, taking it to another level. But... Oh, and I guess that... Is there an accordion that I hear? Is there an accordion that I hear? There's a lot of accordion on this album like zydeco instrumentation maybe oh totally steve jordan did the accordion on radio head um and tommy morell is doing the pedal steel on um this and the next song.

It's starting to fill out, but it still feels sparse. Like this whole album feels like it has a lot of air, like it was almost unfinished. I don't know. What would you do, Ezra, as a professional professional musician what would you add in there well i i this is how i feel about a lot of productions from this era is that i feel like it gets a little bit caught in between you could either add to it or you could strip it down even further like because there's not it's not like uh the first two records have more elements than what's happening here it like truly is the production like the sound of the drums and stuff so i could picture this being

even like smaller and sparser and it might be a little cooler but i yeah, I think it's a pretty good song. And I guess also, I think even though you were saying they're only somewhat related, I went back and watched some scenes in the movie too to get ready, which I think is a really cool, weird movie. We're not talking about the movie today, though. Okay, are you going to talk about the movie? I got to shut you down, Ezra.

We're not talking about the movie. Okay, off limits. That's definitely not happening right now. All right. That's a separate podcast. That's a podcast called I Love Films, and this is not that podcast. We're doing you talking talking heads to my talking head right now so I'm going to have to insist that

all talk of film ceases immediately. Alright it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist as Adam once said. Remember that Adam? Yes I do. I do remember that. One of your most famous quotes. But I, okay I would just say I won't talk about the film.

Yeah, stay away from the film, but make your point. I think all of the simple songs on this record and the Americana gestures and stuff, it all, the more that you see it through the lens of David Byrne's weird interests in this time period about the big open skies of the American heartland and just kind of like how the kind of bizarre feeling that exists underneath the normalcy of American life. So, you know, like if you look at it through that lens these songs i

find i i start to appreciate them more and they open up yeah you know what i mean i do know what you mean i i was watching the uh tom petty peter bogdanovich documentary last night i watched the first part of it oh so good i thought i thought uh it was interesting that tom petty loved cowboy stuff like he grew up just loving everything having to do with cowboys cowboy aesthetic like more than aesthetic just like you know tv shows and movies cowboys i thought that was really interesting i wondered if that played into you know i don't think they ever mentioned i've only watched half of it at this point but i don't think they ever mentioned it playing any part in his music but um i i see what you're saying

ezra that when you listen to this, if you are thinking of the thing we dare not speak of, the movie, it does play into that sort of widescreen, Dust Bowl Americana kind of vision. Yeah, like the dude in a cowboy hat, but like pulling up to like a giant mall parking lot. Again, you're describing scenes from this movie.

No, no, I'm describing an image. Oh, an image in your head. In my mind's eye. I will accept that. Okay, this is the last song. This is City of Dreams. And this is by a band, Talking Heads. Hear where you are standing Dinosaurs did a dance

The Indians told the story Now it has come to pass The Indians had a legend Spaniards live for gold White men came and killed them but they haven't really gone

We live in the city of dreams We drive On this highway of fire Should we wait And find it gone Remember this Our favorite time

What do we think, guys? God, I know this album well, I'm realizing. Like, I listened to this a lot back then. This, I feel like it, if only we had been able to hear what the band would do with a live version, or if Mr. Burns were to incorporate this into his American Utopia or live sets these days, I would love to hear a live version of it that took it to another level. I think it's so beautiful. to be a little like, like it could be a road to nowhere.

And this makes it feel like a little like, and not an afterthought, but just not taking it up a notch as I would expect the band to do. Spare, but not in like a super good way. Like it's a little too spare for what it is. It needs more. Ezra, you, first of all, you have your hand on your chin like the famous statue, The Thinker,

which leads me to believe that you are cooking up something interesting in that noggin of yours. Hit us with it, my man. No, I think uniformly it's strong songwriting on this record. But yeah, I agree with you guys. You can't help but want to hear it either produced differently or live or just something a little different. And then now I'm thinking too, I wonder how much hearing this record

and the themes and the references, I wonder if David Byrne spent a lot of time with Brothers in Arms or Born in the USA. I love that idea in theory, like David Byrne getting really into Dire Straits. Or Mr. Byrne saying, I'm going to make my Springsteen album. We're just like, oh, this is played on the radio quite a bit. But talking about making of Born in the USA, where they try to grapple with the similar themes of modern life in America

and American history and what does it mean to be American, which I think the song's partially going for, with the kind of like, you know, the the continent yeah um i i do love it in theory uh but yeah i agree that there's there's a lot of gestures towards it on this album that that maybe could have gone a bit further who wore it better talking heads or the killers when it comes to doing a springsteen influenced americana uh are you talking about samstown yeah samstown pretty much everything samstown on from the killers ezra well i mean what do we i mean you got to go with the killers of course but to be fair you know talking has did

a lot of things i think with the killers they also had the uh the decades to kind of process and reprocess that those vibes and then of course there's the fact that you know david burn he'll always be rooted in the downtown new york art weirdo thing whereas like brandon is brandon's more springsteen than springsteen in a sense you know like growing up and like i love springsteen than Springsteen in a sense, you know, like growing up and like, I love Springsteen partially because- I would love to hear you say that to Springsteen's face. Oh, well, see this dude over here? Mr. Springsteen, if you're listening, I'm a huge fan. No, what I'm saying is like, maybe because I'm from New Jersey, I've always thought it's like so amazing that Springsteen who started so like all the songs are about New York and New Jersey,

then he makes an album called Nebraska. And he's like such an imaginative songwriter that he can like step into different people's shoes. And even though he's so regional, he became kind of like this voice of America, telling the story of the whole giant nation. And I guess if you could picture a Springsteen song that's about somebody who grew up on like the outskirts of las vegas and started a band or something right like you could picture springsteen crafting that but that's actually who brandon is like he's from the the the town in the debt the showbiz like a character in a springsteen song yeah so i guess all i'm saying is that springsteen created a rich world and brandon like is very entitled to that inspiration.

It makes a lot of sense. I have to give a shout-out to Springsteen's new documentary about his new record, which I listened to the record, and I was like, yeah, I like this. It's good. And then I watched the documentary, and it's incredible, I think. Where do you watch the documentary? Well, it's at Adam's think so just where do you watch the documentary well it's uh at adam's new home on apple apple plus um the album's good the album's good but i tell

you hearing what the songs are about and him talking about it's basically like him doing springsteen on broadway but just about this record because he writes it and he gets very poetic about talking about every song did you see springsteen on broadway uh ezra no i missed all the broadway shows so from oklahoma south pacific book of mormon hamilton you haven't seen any of these no i saw some of those but i started with springsteen on broadway i missed that. Then I missed American Utopia. Oh, right, yes. The musical shows. Yeah, well, anyway, I would love, like, Springsteen on Broadway is so great. Just him talking in these magnificently written passages

about his past in the songs, and he kind of continues that with the new record, and every song on the new record he talks about in this like incredibly poetic way and then here i mean it's a song it's an album where he's grappling essentially with death and uh it's uh it was really powerful i thought so i just want to give a shout out to that i thought it was cool oh sick i'm definitely gonna check that out well you have a lot of homework um oh yeah you know which uh when you come back we're gonna check you on

yeah maybe you'll come back after the Talking Heads reunion tour that we'll have to talk about when they reunite

make a new album and then tour also I would imagine we're gonna have a lot of time to record podcasts when we're on tour with you

singing the backups on your new record so yeah you know we'll have a lot of downtime you know i'm sure we'll watch a little bit of tv but mainly it's going to be us broing out and and talking about music and and uh making sure that you've watched the two things we've asked you to watch oh i will i'm gonna prepare um how do we feel about this record in general i mean

obviously we've talked about it a little bit, but can we sum up our feelings about it? It's not my favorite Talking Heads record, but I think a few songs, Wild Wild Life, Hey Now is fun, Radiohead is cool. I think it's got enough to certainly merit its place in their catalog, and they have a very high bar but i think actually and hearing more about the history of this period i i think it is an

interesting record and i think my only wish is that we got to see more of like we got to see more than one last record after this one because i think this record might even sit better if there were like another four after it right you know like narrative yeah where we were able to go like oh okay that was such an interesting period in there instead it feels it feels to me like weirdly enough it feels like the last real talking heads record it does because naked feels so much like a david byrne solo project in a way it is, and we'll talk about how they made it, but it really feels like the band ended here in a lot of ways and ended not on the strongest note, but on a good note. Like you say, Adam, I listen to this over and over and over,

and like you say, I know these songs really, really well. Yeah. But it just sort of pales in comparison. When you're looking at super commercial Talking Heads records like Little Creatures and this one, it pales a little bit in comparison to the previous. Yeah, and Speaking in Tongues, which is a huge album and just so incredible. I mean, this is really good songwriting, like Ezra said. It's just maybe a little flavorless in spots, but some really great stuff on it.

Sounds like Kulap's lasagna last night. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. But flavorless only in some spots. Only in some spots. Ezra, we want to thank you so much for being on. It's always great to talk to you and to hear your expertise. Oh, I love coming on. Thanks for having me. Maybe someday you'll do a

podcast about us. That would be cool. That'll be the next step. We go through each era. Are you still doing Time Crisis? Yeah, we still do Time time credit you guys got to come back on yeah definitely subway series i don't say that to uh to to get us back on but i just uh anything you want anything you want to plug uh that show is on weekly still or yeah we it's well it's bi-weekly so every two weeks just like us on apple music bye and um either is that let's see vampiric has got four records in stores now working on a fifth yeah that's about it uh anything your wife up to that we can uh plug she's got that new movie out of oh yeah on on that platform we were talking about adam's new home check out on the rocks with rashida bill murray directed by sofia coppola I haven't seen it yet. I can't wait. Oh, it's a great movie.

It's on Apple Plus. And also, you know, because we're talking about music here, you know, Sofia's husband is a legend as well. Oh, Phoenix. Toma from Phoenix. And they did some original music. There's a lot of cool music in the movie. I went to that show they did at the

at the where they took their huge like hollywood bowl lighting their their big like not arena lighting but uh maybe arena lighting did that were they playing arenas i'm not sure but they took their huge lighting rig yeah and they played a a small club here in hollywood oh the fonda yeah they played the fondonda with that huge... Oh, I heard about those shows. Oh, yeah. It was incredible to be in this tiny club

with these huge lights going off and it was such a good show. Those guys are so good. Yeah, Phoenix rules. Yeah. Big fan. If you could

swap bands, would you? Would you be in Phoenix and he would be in Vampire Weekend? Or are you so protective of the vampire weekend legacy that you wouldn't want him fucking with it no i i trust him a lot and i they are that that's a great band it's like all the members of the band are you know getting to know them here

and they're very nice people and um i would actually if we had to do a a swap with anybody i well then i get to go get to go to paris to that's what that's where they write and they got their studio and stuff so that would be a decent one i'm picturing more like that tv show wife swap where it's like just for a couple weeks that's what i was thinking of too if you yeah if you could do a wife swap though with anyone who would you do it with oh no that's uh wait tell you what i'll save that if you had to do a wife swap with adam or me who would you pick suddenly a competition put it away no no i'm gonna think i'm gonna think very deeply about this i'm gonna please do watch those two things and then think about who you want to do a wife swap with.

Um, that is gonna do it for us. Thank you to Ezra. And, uh, we are, we will see you. We're bi-weekly as well.

We'll see you in a couple of weeks. And until then, we certainly hope that you found what you're looking for. Bye.